Mapping Textiles and Tourism in West Georgia Jamie Bynum, Graduate Research Assistant, GIS Specialist, and Researcher, University of West Georgia, Center for Public History
Digital history is a quickly growing field that is being used more and more every day. This field is one that has a multitude of applications and uses for both academia and the public, which is crucial to the field of public history. The work I have completed over the last two years has utilized digital history to bring the history of the textile industry to the public. At the time of writing this article, I am a graduate student at the University of West Georgia graduating with a Master of Arts in Public History and certificate in Museum Studies in May of 2022. Since January of 2020, I have worked as a Graduate Research Assistant for the university’s Center for Public History, directed by Dr. Ann McCleary and Keri Adams, M.A. My work has almost exclusively been for the Center’s West Georgia Textile Heritage Trail project. This project aims to bring the heritage and history of the textile industry to the public in a way that highlights tourism, local exhibits, and community. Due to my Bachelor of Arts degree holding a minor in Geographic Information Systems, I was asked to help with the creation of maps to better put forward the history of west Georgia’s textile industry. These initial maps were completed using Esri’s ArcGIS Story Maps, which uses maps to tell stories from across all fields of study. What makes this program unique is that the maps are not static but interactive and are able to attract more attention from the public. Later, I began creating maps using Esri’s ArcGIS and ArcGIS
Pro programs to create both static and animated maps for my thesis project. The textile industry in West Georgia was and continues to be a significant aspect of many communities. Many communities within our region were founded around the textile mills in the form of mill villages, which were groups of houses built specifically to house their workers. This expansive landscape of the textile industry is one that can be fully studied and appreciated with the use of maps and visual sources. Not only were textile mills located adjacent to their mill village, but also near other mills and their mill villages. The congregation of these mills and villages were the foundation of many modern communities. Our project aims to bring the history of the textile industry not only to researchers but to the descendants of those whose story is being told. The first step in completing these maps was to decide what program we were going to use and what visual aspects we wanted to include. Story Maps was the best choice as it allows the use of photographs and a layout that shows all the location points together to tell a more comprehensive story. Another potential program was Google’s Tour Creator; this program did not work as well for what we wanted to create and has since been discontinued. Picking the program also came with picking aesthetic features we wanted each map to have that would make it identifiable as belonging to our project. Due to the pandemic, we were unable to contact the company and pursue the full customization 49