Since my last blog post, I have completed the most exciting part of my IDEA Grant journey, my research trip. I travelled first to Washington, D.C., to visit the History of Computer Cartography and Geographic Information Sciences Archive at the Library of Congress for five days, then to Philadelphia for the Ian McHarg Collection at the University of Pennsylvania’s Architectural Archives for an additional four days. I was very pleased that I found lots of information in both archives that was relevant to my research on how computer software was used to advance environmental urban planning during the 1970s. However, the large amount of relevant information is my first challenge of the project, as I will have to choose a few key aspects to focus the project on.
As I have been working on this research project for the past year, this is not the first time I’ve had to narrow down or slightly change my research question. My thesis was originally simply a history of geographic information systems from the 1960s-1990s. However, I quickly realized that this topic was too broad and that there were few to none secondary or accessible primary sources on this topic. It was interesting visiting the Library of Congress’s archive because they had all these sources about GIS history I was searching for at the beginning of my project! It was cool to sift through a box and find works of names or organizations that I recognized but was never able to find information about online.
However, I was glad that I now had a sharper question for my thesis. If my topic had still been GIS history broadly, I probably would have had to stay at the Library of Congress Geography and Map Reading Room (where the collection was located) for weeks! In the Ian McHarg Collection at the University of Pennsylvania’s Architectural Archives, I found information relevant to the research topic I have now, which focuses on the environmental planning applications of GIS. Ian McHarg was an influential landscape architect and regional planner who advocated for an awareness of the environment and natural sciences in planning. I specifically searched for sources in the archive on how McHarg’s ecological planning method emphasized collecting and analyzing large quantities of data about the environmental and social factors of a site, first manually, then using computer software.
Now that I have collected the bulk of my primary sources, I have to figure out exactly how they all fit together and start writing. My personal challenges of this goal are writer’s block and staying on schedule for a long-term project. It often feels very intimidating to try to simply start writing how dozens of sources fit together. To overcome this, I’m trying to write a little bit about each source itself, how it answers my research question and relates to the other sources. I then plan on stitching all of these short writing pieces together instead of writing a first draft from scratch. To address the challenge of staying on track for a long-term project, I’m setting goals for each day and week. Something that helps me is setting a certain amount of time to work each day when there aren’t explicit goalposts in the project.
I’m grateful to have found the information I was looking for at the archives, and that both were located in such cool cities! After the archives closed, I got to enjoy what D.C. and Philadelphia had to offer—from walking across the National Mall to visit the Smithsonian museums to exploring new neighborhoods in Philly. Over the next few months, I’m excited to work on and discover how all my research can come together into a narrative.
HSF House Blogs 