Keweenaw Time Traveler - Project News

New Scholarship presented at the Social Science History Association

11/14/2021

The Historical Environments Spatial Analytics Lab faculty, staff, and students presented a number of new projects at the Social Science History Association meeting in Philadelphia this week.

Tim Stone (Senior Research Associate) The Daily Space of Youth: Investigating the Importance of Built and Social Environments to Health in the Industrial City.

Dr. Don Lafreniere (Project Director) What Historical Micro-Spatial Data Can Teach us about Schools as Vectors of Epidemiological Events like COVID-19.

Gary Spikberg (Senior Research Associate) Integrating Deep Mapping and Virtual Reality for Heritage Interpretation.

James Juip (Senior Research Associate) Utilizing the IPUMS Multigenerational Longitudinal Panel to trace industrial worker migration throughout the rust belt and beyond.

Dr. Dan Trepal (Senior Geospatial Research Scientist) Visualizing Narratives of Persistence in Flint: The Flash Project.

New Publication: Mapping Historical Archaeology and Industrial Heritage

10/29/2021

While the Keweenaw Time Traveler Team have been busy planning future public events, we have also continued doing scholarly research using the Time Traveler. Team member Dan Trepal, writing with co-authors and fellow team members Don Lafreniere and Tim Stone, have published a paper in the Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, part of a special issue on ‘Spatial Computation in Archaeology and History.’ Our paper demonstrates how the Time Traveler team uses historical spatial data to aid in archaeological research. Using case study projects undertaken by MTU researchers in places like Calumet and at the Quincy Smelter in Ripley, we explain how our detailed and layered representations of past landscapes can benefit archaeologists working in the Copper Country in several ways. These include: using the historical data in the Time Traveler to help plan fieldwork and contextualize discoveries at specific locations such as the site of a Chinese Laundry in Calumet; visually combining multiple historical maps, blueprints, and aerial photos to guide remote sensing investigations at the Quincy Copper Smelter looking for buried structures within the complex; and modeling past industrial pollution generation to identify the highest-risk neighborhoods in the Calumet-Laurium area a century ago. The paper has been published electronically and is available here.

Augmented Reality Pilot Testing

10/8/2021

Senior Time Traveler Gary Spikberg has been developing an augmented reality application that utilizes Keweenaw Time Traveler datasets and maps to support industrial heritage interpretation around the Keweenaw. This week he tested the first beta version of the app with MTU students in Dr. Rouleau's History of the Copper Country class.

The demo was conducted in at the Champion #4 mine in Painesdale. Thank you to Painesdale Mine and Shaft Inc. for giving us and the students access to their amazing site.

Student Spotlight! Cas Tuson

8/13/2021

Michigan Tech students are the lifeblood of the Michigan Miners at Home and Work project. Since January 2020, our team has been scanning and transcribing employee cards in the Calumet & Hecla Mining Companies collection in the Michigan Tech Archives. One of our most dedicated students is leaving and we want to celebrate her achievements!

Cas Tuson has transcribed over 7000 employee cards. That's almost 20 cards a day over the course of a year and about 20% of the total cards transcribed for the project. That's a lot! We will miss her dedication and the energy she brought to the team.

Cas received a B.S. in Applied Physics in Spring 2021 (and she made Dean's List!). We asked her how her skills from Physics lab helped her work on the Mapping Michigan Miners project:

After spending a year reading and creating metadata from these employee cards, Cas also reflected on just how much she could get to know a person's story from the information kept by the Calumet & Hecla company:

Cas is heading off to the University of Idaho to study planetary physics. Best of luck in all your future endeavors and please stay in touch! You can follow our progress on this project by keeping an eye on this Project News page and our social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

This project is supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Tim Stone Presents Paper on Childhood Risk using Keweenaw Time Traveler Data

6/24/2021

On Wednesday morning, Time Traveler Timothy Stone, recent graduate of our BS in Sustainability Sciences and Society program (and incoming Industrial Heritage & Archaeology MS student) presented a paper at the Society for the History of Children and Youth International Conference. Timothy’s presentation was modelled off a paper that is currently under review which attempts to illuminate the importance of using individual-level records (as we do in the Keweenaw Time Traveler) when studying children’s spaces. Whereas many researchers use only census locations to examine children’s spaces, we were able to integrate school records as well, giving us a more wholistic understanding of the quality and hazards these students faced every day. Stay tuned for more updates.

Mary Probovich, an 8th grade student in Washington High School, travelled through some heavily industrialized areas on her way to and from school each day. In addition, her school was bordered by railroad tracks, and was about 100 meters away from Calumet and Hecla’s Shaft #2. Despite her home being in a residential location, we predict she experienced some of the harshest built environments throughout the day out of our sample!

Combining the predicted quality of children’s various activity spaces shows much more variation than when scholars simply rely on census locations, which essentially provide a picture of night-time exposure. This ignores children’s mobility and the fact that they are exposed to hazards as they move throughout the day.

Vernacular Architecture in the Copper Country

6/9/2021

Students brave unseasonably cold weather at the Eagle Harbor Lighthouse.

Did you know the Keweenaw is hosting the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s annual conference in 2024? Members of the Geospatial Research Facility, Michigan Tech’s Social Science Department, and local community members are already hard at work preparing for this event.

The Vernacular Architecture Forum is known as North America’s premier organization focused on the study of ordinary buildings and structures. Members come from all across North America and are interested in a wide variety of scholarly fields including history, geography, landscape history, historic preservation, and architectural history. Recent conferences have been held in Durham NC, Salt Lake City UT, Philadelphia PA. The future conference schedule includes trips to San Antonio Tx, and Plymouth MA, before arriving in the Keweenaw in 2024.

In the fall of 2020, Dr. Sarah Fayen Scarlett and nine students in the Documentation of Historic Structures class worked to document the tourism landscapes present in Copper Harbor for their inclusion into the 2024 conference tour and guidebook. Field work in Copper Harbor centered around the Minnetonka Resort which was founded in 1938 as a cabin camp to accommodate automobile tourists attracted to the area by the Keweenaw Mountain Lodge and other tourist infrastructure developed by the Keweenaw County Road Commission and funded by the WPA. Students used a mixed methods approach based in architectural fieldwork and historical research to interpret how, over the following eighty years, the Minnetonka Resort worked to adapt to national trends in automobile travel and outdoor recreation.

This research in Keweenaw County is continuing over the summer. Dr. Scarlett and 4 graduate students from the Social Science department and the University of Wisconsin—Madison have arrived back from a week of field work in Eagle Harbor and Copper Harbor. The team documented the assistant lightkeepers’ houses and other structures at the Eagle Harbor lighthouse (whose original design plans exist in U.S. Coast Guard Records) as well as a group of 1930s cabins on Harbor Lane in Copper Harbor. This kind of documentation includes measuring the buildings inside and out to create field notes using graph paper and an architectural scale. Later in the summer, students will create final drawings using SketchUp, a computer drafting program. These floor plans (and a few elevations) will appear in the guidebook created for VAF conference attendees to use as they visit the sites in 2024. Thank you to the Keweenaw County Historical Society and the homeowners who hosted the group!

Stay tuned for more information about the upcoming VAF conference, and how you can help contribute to making this exciting event a reality! Over the next few years, Dr. Scarlett will be working with students and colleagues to develop tours that highlight industrial mining landscapes as well as sites in southern Houghton County.

Industrial Heritage and Archaeology student Val Pulido works on fieldnotes at Harbor Lane.

Postcards: Social media records of the past

5/13/2021

The advent of digital technologies has made incredible strides in "shrinking" the world around us, allowing us to communicate in real time over vast distances. It's even more impressive when we think about the relative "youth" of these technologies. How many of you remember surrendering your phone line so your modem could connect to EarthLink, CompuServ, or AOL? When did you first make use of email? Now, compare these changes to the speed of your text messages or social media posts.

Now, how many of you think of postcards only as souvenirs instead of thinking of them as historical social media?

It's true! From their initial development in the mid-1800s, postcards evolved to capture key elements of life, from particular forms of dress to historical landscapes that no longer exist. Postcards have quite a rich history.

Postcards serve as clues, telling you where someone traveled, when someone traveled, and might share the places they consider important during their travel (restaurants, activities, or hotels). Compare this to a Facebook post where someone uploads pictures of a family vacation and tags the location. Also, postcards were less expensive to mail than letters. Even today, a postcard costs $0.36 to mail compared to the $0.55 to mail a first class letter.

The postcard above was shared on a Facebook group for Vintage Michigan Postcards. If you look in the lower right, the postcard was printed by the Detroit Publishing Company. Check out the Library of Congress's page on the Detroit Publishing Company (DPC) for more information on the company and their extensive collection. The Newberry has an online guide available which explains their dating of DPC postcards, and according to their numbering schema, this postcard appears to date from between 1908-1909.

When you examine this postcard, and recognize the year is approximately 1908, what stands out at you? What do you think about the prevalence of electricity and street lights? What does the street and sidewalk tell you about transportation?

Postcards give us a great deal of insight into the past, and they can serve as artifacts and clues for your own investigations into the past. St. John's University has a well-designed library guide which presents an overview of postcards and how to pose historical research questions related to postcards, and the New York Public Library has an informative page on the use of postcards in local historical research developed by their Managing Research Librarian in the US History, Local History, and Genealogy division.

Historians are still struggling with how to use social media in the future, but looking to the past helps us frame these questions for later generations.

Congratulating Dr. Sarah Fayen Scarlett

5/2/2021

The Keweenaw Time Traveler team has more good news to announce. Our project Co-Director, Dr. Sarah Fayen Scarlett just received a promotion, with tenure, from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor. Dr. Scarlett is a social historian studying landscapes, architecture, and material culture with the understanding that we both influence, and are influenced by, our built and social environments.

This promotion is certainly well-deserved. Dr. Scarlett's research and engagement at both local and national levels highlights the significance of the Copper Country.

Dr. Scarlett has a forthcoming book titled Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and The Transformation of Michigan's Mining Frontier (University of Tennessee Press 2021), and she being the Project Director for the major grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources, Digitizing Hidden and Special Collections and Archives for Michigan Miners at Home and Work: Digitizing, Mapping, and Sharing Employment Records, a project focusing on transcribing, mapping, and record linking 40,000 employee cards from the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company.

Under Drs. Scarlett and Lafreniere, the Keweenaw Time Traveler has continued to grow. We recently received an additional National Endowment for the Humanities, Digital Humanities grant which will fund our deep mapping efforts through 2023.

Congratulations to the Class of 2021

4/30/2021

Since its inception, the Keweenaw Time Traveler has been blessed with many talented, creative, and engaging teammates. Today, we celebrate the graduation of four peers and teammates!

Brooke Batterson received her Bachelor of Arts in History. Brooke's research focused on French-Canadian social mobility in the Copper Country.

Tim Stone received his Bachelor of Science in Sustainability Science and Society. Tim received the Department of Social Sciences Outstanding Senior Award, researching the built and social environments of children's experiences in 20th century America's industrial cities.

Both Brooke and Tim will be joining the Department of Social Sciences Industrial Heritage and Archaeology Program in Fall of 2021.

Mason Sayles received a Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering. Mason contributed greatly to expanded search options within the Time Traveler. One of the upgrades included improved through social media.

Sabrina "Cas" Tuson received a Bachelor of Science in Applied Physics. Cas worked behind the scenes as a Transcriber with our project, Mapping Miners at Home and Work. This project involves digitizing and mapping 40,000 employee cards from the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company!

Zach Dill received a Master of Business Administration. Zach also worked behind the scenes on, Mapping Miners at Home and Work and worked with the pilot version of this project in summer 2018. The pilot's success helped secure the grant funding making our current project possible. Check out his video here!

Mason Sayles (L) and Cas Tuson (R)

Historic Coastlines: Using Geospatial Technologies for Coastal Resiliency

4/8/2021

For the past four years, the Geospatial Research Facility (GRF) has partnered with Michigan's Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) to research geomorphological processes at work by harnessing the power of geographic information science (GISc) and historical imagery. After a fifteen-year period of near historic lows, all of the Great Lakes have exceeded their average monthly levels since 2014. While seasonal variations are common, both persistent lows and highs present their own unique dangers for coastlines, for homes, and for businesses that depend on the Great Lakes. Hydropower and boat-related activity particularly suffer beneath reduced water levels while sudden increases in water levels present threats to our shores and coastlines. By early 2020, the Michigan Municipal League estimated high water damages to public lands and infrastructure had reached $63.7 million.

The GRF uses geospatial technology and scenario-based land-use planning methods for the purpose of protecting our coastal resources and strengthening our coastal communities' resilience in the face of coastal hazards. The GRF's team of GIS analysts began with an archive of historic aerial imagery spanning eighty years. The team meticulously georeferenced the images against contemporary shorelines, developing a photomosaic of our past shorelines at well-documented intervals and digitized the past shorelines and bluff lines. The GRF can use these digitized shorelines to visualize and analyze change over time, modeling the rate of coastal change and applying a Coastal Vulnerability Index (CVI) for identifying areas more vulnerable to erosion.

Understanding our coastal change over time provides critical data as EGLE responds to the growing erosion problems faced by our coastal communities.

The GRF's viewer for Lakes Huron and Michigan

Click Here for the Lake Michigan and Lake Huron Historical Shoreline Viewer

The GRF's Lake Superior Viewer

Click Here for the Lake Superior Historical Shoreline Viewer

Financial assistance for this project was provided, in part, by the Michigan Coastal Zone Management Program, Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, and is supported through a grant under the National Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972, as amended, administered by the Office for Coastal Management, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.