AAG Abstract, final draft

Ok, I think this is it; I'm submitting it now. Wish me luck! I kind of feel like I'm taking a $200 gamble. To be fair though, I'm also rather looking forward to the conference for its own sake. I'm not as familiar with the field of geography as I'd like to be, and though my applications will all be done by then, I'd really like to see what kind of work is being done and presented on.

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This poster examines the historical geography of Pike Creek, a buried urban river in the post-industrial Great Lakes town of Kenosha, Wisconsin. This research highlights the significance of this nearly-forgotten river to the city in both the past and the present. Urban Streams and rivers are receiving increasing attention around the world. Restorations of existing streams, or “daylighting” of streams rerouted underground have taken place in cities as varied as San Luis Obispo, California; Detroit, Michigan; and Seoul, South Korea.

My mixed-methods research into the historic geography of Pike Creek involves archival research with plat maps and tax records, early written histories of the city, noted planner Harland Bartholomew’s 1925 comprehensive city plan, newspaper archives, municipal board of health records, and academic theses. Research on the present context includes oral history interviews with people who have lived experience of the creek, as well as first-hand exploration and photography of remaining portions of the waterway. Finally, I performed GIS-facilitated spatial analysis of the creek by comparing census data and city zoning information with the creek route to highlight the number of people living within the watershed and the wide array of cityscapes that it connects.

The urban development that reshaped Pike Creek from the center of Kenosha’s major industries into a fragmented series of streams and drainage channels offers insight into understandings of, and relationships with, waterways on scales from individual to regional. I trace the historical geography of the river’s transformation from critical resource, to development nuisance, to forgotten relic.

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There's going to be a four foot by eight foot poster board for me? That's huge! I wonder if I can fill it. I do have plenty of visual material that's germane to this project. Many years of historic plat maps, photographs, my own digitization and analysis work....

AAG Acceptance

Oh wow. From my confirmation email: "Congratulations on a successful submission of your abstract to the 2015 Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois. Please remember that the AAG accepts all submissions, and that you will be expected to present."

There it is. I'm in!

Wish me luck on getting this thing put together!

*bounces*

Excel problem

I have a technical, Excel-related question for those who know the program.

I'm having issues with Excel displaying large numbers in scientific notation, even when I don't want it to, and *even when they're formatted as text*. I spent over an hour trying to fix this issue earlier this week in order to join a couple of tables within ArcGIS. The only way I could get them to display properly was:

First: format the column of numbers as text. They still showed in scientific notation, so

Second: click each individual cell, then click the field at the top that shows the actual value. This changed the displayed value in the cell. I had to do that for each of the 120-plus cells, which was a pain in the ass, and not practical on a much larger scale.

Do any of you know what I'm taking about? All I can find online is a bunch of people with the same problem, some of whom have a lot of profanity to direct at Excel and Microsoft. I can relate. Were it up to me, Excel would never, ever reformat anything into scientific notation ever. But alas, there seems to be no such option. But why on God's green Earth do they reformat *text* that way?

Kenosha Municipal Golf Course

I posted more Pike Creek photos today. This one is a portion of the creek that flows through the Washington Park Municipal Golf Course. It's also another one that I think turned out rather nicely.





We sneaked in through an open and disused gate at the top of the embankment leading down into the course, pushing our way through the thick undergrowth toward the water.

What most caught my eye here was the placement of the willow trees. Their even spacing clearly indicates they were part of landscaping, but by their size they've been there a long time!

I wonder if this golf course floods when Washington Bowl floods. They are the same waterway after all, both in a depression, and quite close to each other.

(My copy of John Henry, replacing the one that disappeared in my move, arrived this week and I'm listening to it. It's a really cool thing to be listening to music that I know so well that I can sing along with it while still having my brain free for typing up posts and photo processing!)

Water-related Public Works?

Do I know anybody who knows anybody who knows about water-related civil engineering? I have some pictures of a few concrete water-management structures along Pike Creek that I'd really like to know the function of! Things like this for instance.





There are a number of other public works I have questions about too.