I’m excited to include links here to the Indigenous Chicago Digital Resources that I was honored to work on for the past three years. Indigenous-chicago.org speeks for itself so I won’t add too much here other than some links.

You can find the digital maps here:

https://indigenous-chicago.org/storymap/

And you can find the Urban Archives Maps (an interactive tour with hundreds of interpreted locations) here:

https://map.indigenous-chicago.org/pr/indigenous-chicago

I am especially proud of the work we did on the “Re-Thinking Chicago’s Founding” city story which is a virtual tour through the treaty-era of settler Chicago.

In 2020, I made a digital exhibit with GIS software and TimelineJS about US Presidential Election Turnout over time. Click this link for the full exhibit.(I can’t embed it here without paying $25 a month.)

Originally, I made the GIF below and conducted a survey asking what people learned about US election turnout from the GIF.

To many, the most shocking moment in the GIF is when the US South transforms dark red during Reconstruction to light pink during the early twentieth century. The GIF illustrates the anti-Democratic project of white supremacy very clearly.

However, not much else pops out of the GIF right away so I created the digital exhibit to interpret the data more directly. Timeline JS is a wonderful technology that allowed me to include the other information like the overall voter turnout, the leading candidates, and other information. On some of the dates, I included information about major changes to the voting rights or social change.

I won’t be blogging here, but I want to share a bit about this cover photo. On the 2022 anniversary of D-Day, I visited Omaha Beach in Normandy, France to honor my long since past grandfather, Floyd Stamilio. I was deeply moved by this place. This photo is my attempt to capture the horrifying distance that my grandfather was tasked with traversing. In the face of a wall of bullets, he crawled three hundred meters over this blood-soaked beach. That grassy embankment provided his salvation, my family’s future, and the beginning of an east-bound anti-fascist project that swept across Europe.