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Author: Dr. Dan Trepal The Keweenaw Time Traveler Project is designed for exploring the historical people, places, and stories of the Keweenaw and Copper Country. Our information about historical people comes from a wide variety of historical records, and the largest and most detailed set of records we have to work with is the US decennial census. Our latest version of the Keweenaw Time Traveler App will launch this summer with a huge new amount of historical data drawn from the census. Let’s take a minute for a quick overview of what the US census is and what you will be able to learn from census data in the Keweenaw Time traveler. The US Constitution contains provisions for conducting a ‘decennial’ (once every ten years) census, which is a detailed count of the nation’s population. The US government conducted its first census in 1790, and has continued to do so every ten years, through the latest census in 2020. Since 1902 the census has been managed by the US Census Bureau. For people interested in history the census is a priceless record. This is because it attempts to record each and every US citizen, and includes important details including their name, address, age, sex, family status and composition, occupation, immigration status, country of origin, language spoken, and literacy, among others. As a result, the census is the largest, most detailed, and most complete record we have for people living in the US - and in the Copper Country! - and it preserves many fascinating details about their lives.  All US Census records have been retained by the Federal government - and while they are public records, the sheer size of the censuses (in their original paper form, or as microfilm copies) makes them difficult to use for historical or genealogy research. These physical records are also at risk of damage, like any archival document. In 1921, a portion of the records for the 1890 census were damaged in a fire in a federal repository in Washington DC, and most of the damaged records were later destroyed. As a result, the 1890 census has largely been lost. This led to more careful storage, but highlighted the need for a better way to store and access the census. Beginning in the 1990s, a large research project called the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, or IPUMS, began creating a digital version of the US census records. This eventually grew into a collaboration with the genealogical organization FamilySearch and the genealogical companies HeritageQuest and Ancestry.com. IPUMS has also built their own online portal for accessing census data. The result of this huge ongoing project is that census records now exist in a searchable, digital online format that is much more accessible to experts and the public alike. IPUMS has also expanded its census work to other national censuses, so that it now includes a total of about 1 billion individual records from more than 100 countries. The Keweenaw Time Traveler project has partnered with IPUMS to incorporate census data for the Houghton and Keweenaw counties for the period from 1880 through 1940 (excluding the ‘lost’ 1890 census). Our census dataset contains nearly 380,000 individual records for this period, making it the biggest record set in the Keweenaw Time Traveler. The census data helps us to ‘populate’ the historical Copper Country with the people who lived and worked there in the 19th and 20th centuries, with all the details showing their backgrounds, livelihoods, social connections - in short, hundreds of thousands of the individual life stories that make up the heritage of Copper Country. In a future blog post, we will talk more about how we have mapped people in these censuses to our digital historical landscape in the Keweenaw Time Traveler, tying the original census data even more closely to the historical landscape of the copper country, and making it easier for you to explore your history. 
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In anticipation of the upcoming launch of our new Explore App the KeTT team is hosting a new video series! Every Thursday host James Juip will sit down with fellow KeTT team members for a lunch time chat, discussing all the great work our team is doing to develop some exciting new things that will be a part of our new release. This week James sits down with Dr. Sarah Fayen Scarlett to discuss the new Keweenaw Time Traveler Explore App and recent design charrettes put on by the Time Traveler Team. Author - Dr. Sarah Fayen-Scarlett Building the Keweenaw Time Traveler has always been a group effort. It takes many different people to ensure this resource will be an engaging public history project, a powerful tool for research, and also accessible to as many users as possible. One way that our production team seeks input from future users is through “Design Charrettes.” In urban planning, a design charrette brings together stakeholders to collaboratively develop a solution to a shared design problem. The Keweenaw Time Traveler team has been holding design charrettes since our early years to make sure that users with different kinds of experience will be able to access and enjoy it. This Spring, as our production team is finalizing the new design and user interface, we have been holding Design Charrettes to guide the development of Help resources. What do users need to know to make the most of the Time Traveler’s resources? Which parts of the interface are less intuitive than others? What should our Help buttons provide? We held two different charrettes — one to test the data search functions and another to test the map interfaces. We held these charrettes on Zoom to keep everyone comfortable amid changing COVID restrictions, but also because earlier Zoom charrettes in 2020 had alerted us to the advantages of watching people interact with the Time Traveler on their own home computers. We invited users from the immediate community and partners from regional heritage organizations to join us for an hour of online exploration and follow up discussion. After a brief introduction, each participant went into a “breakout room” with two Time Traveler team members. The participants shared their screen and the team member asked them to use the Time Traveler in specific ways – Can you find the home of a certain person? How far did their children have to walk to school in Calumet in 1921? Is it clear how to switch the base maps? Participants always had a chance to explore freely so they could show us how they wanted to use the Time Traveler and how the user interface could be tweaked to improve their experiences. The whole group always came back together to debrief and share observations from the break out rooms. Afterwards, the Keweenaw Time Traveler production team develop a list of changes in direct response to participant feedback.  We appreciate all the time our participants gave these charrettes. Thank you! Participants included local residents who use the Time Traveler a lot, Michigan Tech students and researchers, and staff of Michigan Tech University Archives and Historical Collections and the Keweenaw National Historical Park.
In anticipation of the upcoming launch of our new Explore App the KeTT team is hosting a new video series! Every Thursday host James Juip will sit down with fellow KeTT team members for a lunch time chat, discussing all the great work our team is doing to develop some exciting new things that will be a part of our new release. This week James sits down with Ryan Williams and Matt Monte of Monte Consulting to discuss their partnership in developing the new Keweenaw Time Traveler Explore App. Please tune in next week when James and Dr. Sarah F. Scarlett discuss design charettes and their role in the app development process.
The Keweenaw Time Traveler Team in partnership with Monte Consulting have been developing a brand new version of the Explore App working to provide a more immersive mapping experience as well as make more historical data available to the public.  Monte Consulting is a nationally recognized web developer located right here in Houghton! They have been working to develop a beautiful interface powerful enough to deliver the data-rich “deep mapping” experience, and intuitive enough to make it all seem simple. As development of the new application moves towards its final stages the KeTT team are hosting charrettes to try out the new design. Look for more information to come!  A lot of work is also going on behind the scenes to make more historical data available when the new application is released. Faculty, staff, and students in Michigan Tech's Geospatial Research Facility have been developing historical data sets to be mapped. An amazing set of records from the Calumet Schools have been transcribed and mapped. Census records from 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940 are almost complete. A set of almost 40,000 Calumet & Hecla employee cards are also being digitized, transcribed, and mapped thanks to a major grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources. Most importantly, the individual names in all of these records are being connected to one another and to residences on the maps so you will be able to see connections between people and places over time. Thanks to generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities and additional funding from the Advisory Commission of the Keweenaw National Historical Park, our new interface will provide access to over 447,000 historical records and a wide variety of historical maps! Look forward to more updates as we get closer to launch!  Gary, Dr. Don, Ryan Please join us in congratulating two of our Time Travelers Gary Spikberg and Ryan Williams. Gary graduated with a Masters Degree in Industrial Heritage and Archeology. His Master's Report studied the combination of Augmented Reality and GIS technologies as a potential tool for industrial heritage and education. His project used Keweenaw Time Traveler maps and city directories to create an Augmented Reality Experience for students exploring the Champion Mine, in Painesdale Michigan, which is in its early stages of heritage tourism development.
You can read his report here: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/etdr/1317/ Ryan completed a Masters in Geographic Information Science. His project, sponsored by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, is working to map how Michigan’s Great Lakes shorelines have changed over the past 80+ years. Products of this project include publicly available digital, georeferenced, historic aerial photography datasets, as well as map layers depicting the locations of historic shorelines and bluff lines from 1938, 1980, 2009, 2016, 2018, and 2020. Additional products include bluff retreat risk areas, shoreline rate of change map layers, and tools to assist in the development of future Coastal Vulnerability Index projects for the Great Lakes. All products are available as publicly accessible maps, apps, and feature services at: https://portal1-geo.sabu.mtu.edu/mtuarcgis/apps/webappviewer/?id=d758800bb18e460ab39aa66631051156 You can read Ryan's report here: digitalcommons.mtu.edu/etdr/1326/  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.   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.  
 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.
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