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This post was written by Audrey Jiang, a long-time resident of Houghton and current sophomore at Yale University. She worked with Dr. Sarah Fayen Scarlett to complete this project.
I am pleased to report that the contents of the Copper Country Architects website has been entered into the Keweenaw Time Traveler! The Copper Country Architects website, which can be visited here, is an extensive online biographical index of architects who worked in the region and their respective buildings. The highlight of the website is the historical research about each building, which can be sorted by time period, location, and type. These architectural historical profiles were researched and written by Professor Kim Hoagland and students in her SS3515 History of American Architecture course mostly completed in 2006 and augmented in following years. My project builds on their previous work by mapping the information from the Copper Country Architects profiles in location-specific stories in the Keweenaw Time Traveler. Just enter the keywords “CC Architects” into the KeTT search bar, and you will be greeted with a torrent of story entries – chock-full of information about the history, purpose, and design of 150 buildings in the Keweenaw. All of these story entries have been carefully placed on their respective historic maps – which is the magic of the Keweenaw Time Traveler. Here, in this environment, visitors can sift through different layers of a rich storied landscape, with the ability to see how it has changed and continues to change.
The work for the project started by condensing the information from the CC Architects profile of each building into a few sentences for each Keweenaw Time Traveler story point. The content of the profiles vary widely — some are very brief, others very long. For example, in the profile of the Ulseth House below, there is only one paragraph detailing the design of the house. Other profiles, however, such as the profile of the Hugo Field and Lucy Gartner House, read more like lengthy encyclopedia entries. This presented a challenge — how was one to choose the right framework for these entries, considering their differences in content and style?
As I worked, I started to fall back on my two handy tools of narrativization and familiarity. I’ve always believed people connect well to stories that relate to them – as a result, I started looking for familiar details that I could bring out, such that I could trace the arc of a building’s origins to how it became what it is now. I also looked out for specific people or families as anchoring points, so to speak, of a story. I definitely think my experience growing up in the Keweenaw helped me in this respect – I came into the project with a good idea of what people like me might know and be drawn to. After I condensed each of the CC Architects stories, I deposited them into a Google Doc, which was organized by location. Last came the step of entering all of these Google Doc entries into the Keweenaw Time Traveler itself. While not “that difficult” by any means, finding the buildings among the interconnected web of map, icon, and text sometimes required an underrated kind of care and patience. In this task, however, I also felt like I really started to understand the appeal of the Time Traveler – yes, sometimes you may have to search extremely closely for what you are looking for, but in the process of doing so, you get to experience the complexities of many real-world stories in one virtual space.
I came into this project with the mindset of creating engaging stories for others. What I didn’t expect, though, was how those stories would imprint themselves onto me. Suddenly, buildings that I had seen almost all my life weren’t just “that building there,” they were “St. Anne’s Church from my architects project.” I remember walking past the Blum Building in Calumet with a friend, and experiencing the shock of recognition when I saw its distinctive red and gold color scheme. In some sense, trying to create familiar stories for other people familiarized me with the structures of my own life. In addition to a newfound appreciation for the local area, it was also eye-opening to see a different kind of history than the type I’m used to doing. Nowadays, I spend a lot of time in a distant place, reading histories of distant times and regions. It’s nice to get a taste of history that is more intimate, more grounded in my own life and surroundings. So here’s to bringing history closer to communities! Big thanks to the Michigan Tech Social Sciences Department, and especially Dr. Sarah Fayen Scarlett, for making this possible! (And please do check out both the entries on the Time Traveler and the Copper Country Architects website!
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