Category: Urban
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An Easy Way to Map Data in R with Plotly
A couple of years ago, I wrote The complete n00bs guide to mapping in R, my first adventure into R. While that tutorial still holds up, if you’re looking to make a state-level Choropleth Map, there really isn’t anything easier than working with Ploty in R. Once you get R and RStudio installed and set…
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What makes your city famous?
Last weekend, I was watching Clueless and looked up Pismo Beach, California on Wikipedia after Cher spearheads the disaster relief efforts for that city. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Pismo Beach claims to be the “Clam Capital of the World.” My dissertation examines the identities of cities claiming to be the “Capital of…
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“The Biggest City of Its Size in this Country”
At the beginning of the semester, I finished my dissertation prospectus. My committee told me to drastically cut the number of case studies with which I had begun (among many other good suggestions), lightening the workload while keeping the core idea. With the semester over, I’m going to try to recommit to discussing my research…
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Playing with Gephi
I finally got around to playing with sample data I collected on a research trip last summer. The data comes from the Rockford Chair and Furniture Company Records at Northern Illinois University. The most exciting part of this is that these visualizations were orders from one day, November 5, 1891, and they have several years…
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Home of the Reuben
Later this month, Frank’s Kraut will officially name Omaha “The Home of the Reuben Sandwich.” While this title may seem like a humorous footnote in the city’s story, I would suggest it is indicative of the changing nature of Midwestern cities’ identities. Omaha’s first identity was as one of the Gateways to the West. The…
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Does size matter?
How big exactly is a small city? This came up at my panel at the Urban History Conference (and rightfully so, it was organized around the theme of small cities). Being a notion central to my research, I have thought a bit about what exactly it means, making some notes about what other sources have…
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Where am I from?
Where are you from? A simple question, well sort of. Even though it is a seemingly innocuous question, asking where some one “comes from” actually looks to discover the initial impressions of a person by situating them culturally as well as geographically. There are plenty of social stereotypes centered around geographical location. Like it or…
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ArtPrize
Last summer, I wrote about public art and its usefulness from an urban perspective. Last month, I was back in Grand Rapids for a couple of days during ArtPrize and got to see some of the pieces around the city. While walking around downtown Grand Rapids, the difference between the ArtPrize approach and Lincoln’s more…
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Invest in Art
The Lincoln Journal Star is reporting today the Lincoln Partners for Public Art Development wants to turn Lincoln into a center for world class public art. First of all, I love the idea. Lincoln has a solid foundation of art from which it can build, including UNL’s Philip Johnson-designed Sheldon Museum of Art. And public…
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Urban Portal
Urban Portal catalogs seemingly every resource available online to urban scholars. The project’s main sections, emerging research and resources boast a large number of links with impressive search functions. Emerging research has two sections, “Issues” and “New & Noteworthy.” Issues are short scholarly examinations of socially relevant topics, like Does racial segregation hurt the poor?.…
Brian Sarnacki 