Mapping Hill-Burton Data; The Resource Territory of the Appalachian Coal Fields (1946-1956)

UMOR funding was granted to use digital humanities methods to visualize the regional history of hospitalization and federal agency in creating a national network of hospitals. I am a historian and theorist of architecture seeking to understand the role of federal funding in advancing architectural agendas. An undergraduate student from the School of Nursing was paid to enter data from a 1956 publication of hospital construction funding by state. This data was then used regrouped into regions other than the federal categories that obscured the role of the resource territory of the coal seam that extends from Pennsylvania to Tennessee. A student in the Master of Urban Design program created visualizations of this data showing the changes in beds per 1,000 citizens in various regions, testing hypothesis about which regions had the greatest increases and which received the most funding. These maps were presented at the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) Annual Conference May 11, 2018 and are included in The Architecture of Good Behavior.

Faculty

Joy Knoblauch