T-RACES: Testbed for the Redlining of Archives of California Exclusionary Spaces
The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), in collaboration with the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at UNC Chapel Hill, will preserve, analyze, and make publicly accessible online documents relating to the practice of redlining neighborhoods in the 1930s and 1940s in eight California cities (redlining refers to the practice of flagging minority neighborhoods as undesirable for home loans.)
Redlining is a practice that started in the 1930s when the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) asked Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to create "residential security maps" to indicate the level of security for real-estate investments in different cities. These maps used color coding to indicate which areas were more or less desirable based on the demographics of that area. Neighborhoods that were "A" grade and considered most desirable had a Caucasian population. Those areas that were red were considered the least desirable for development because they had "subversive racial elements" (non-whites).
The T-RACES project is an online archive using GoogleMap and GoogleEarth to organize its informational interface around the notion of the neighborhood. It makes visible the relationship between data and segregation by making visible the racial lines drawn on our geographic space and opens up possibilities for collaborative scholarly work in digital humanities.
This project will go live in a couple of weeks and be available through Vectors Online Journal.
http://salt.diceresearch.org/T-RACES/demo/#
http://www.vectorsjournal.org/