posted by Amy Hillier

on March 27, 2007

We celebrated Du Bois' 139th birthday on Friday, February 23rd at Du Bois College House on Penn's campus. It was a very festive event, featuring the gospel group, New Spirit of Penn, a birthday cake with Du Bois' photograph on it, and a life-size cut-out of Dr. Du Bois, himself. We didn't want HIM to miss the party.

On Tuesday, Anne Garcia, Brandon Gollotti and I visited Masterman High School to tell students in two African-American history classes about our Mapping Du Bois project. They seemed excited about our idea for a "Theirspace.com" site that would allow students to develop the profile of an historical figure from the 7th ward using the 1900 census data, other historical documents, and their imagination. On Wednesday, Anne and I visited five different classes at Eastern High School in Camden County, NJ for the same reason. They found a lot of our ideas to be fun, too. Two students challenged our idea for a myspace-like site, expressing concerns about the ethics of making up information about real people. We hope to return to Eastern High School before the end of the school year.

Slowly but surely, we are making progress on the "mapping" part of Mapping Du Bois. Kelly did a lot of work to clean the 27,000 records we have from the 1900 census, and now I'm recoding it using the IPUMS codes. Josiah finished assigning addresses to our parcel map layer for the 7th ward. Several team members will be fact-checking the census data we collected over the next two months. Then we can move ahead with developing the online mapping system.

Kudos to Jaamal for his great design work on the website and to Eric for making the website work, especially for migrating our blog from blogspot over to our own website!