Deryck W. Holdsworth

Visual Analysis of Historic Hotel Visitation Patterns

Understanding the space and time characteristics of human interaction in complex social networks is a critical component of visual tools for intelligence analysis, consumer behavior analysis, and human geography. Visual identification and comparison of patterns of recurring events is an essential feature of such tools. In this paper, we describe a tool for exploring hotel visitation patterns in and around Rebersburg, Pennsylvania from 1898-1900. The tool uses a wrapping spreadsheet technique, called reruns, to display cyclic patterns of geographic events in multiple overlapping natural and artificial calendars. Implemented as an improvise visualization, the tool is in active development through a iterative process of data collection, hypothesis, design, discovery, and evaluation in close collaboration with historical geographers. Several discoveries have inspired ongoing data collection and plans to expand exploration to include historic weather records and railroad schedules. Distributed online evaluations of usability and usefulness have resulted in numerous feature and design recommendations

CORPORATE CAPITALISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE HIGH-RISE OFFICE BUILDING

Although the skyscrapers emergence has been attributed to the genius of individual architects, innovations in building technology, real estate values, and the symbolic value of tall buildings, this paper presents another, perhaps more critical reason for its emergence: demand for office space. Using Toronto, Canada as a case study, office occupancy data are examined to highlight the morphological transformation of a downtown area. The transition from entrepreneurial to corporate capitalism resulted in the proliferation of very small interdependent office establishments and the growth of large offices with several hundred employees. Both components of demand influenced size of office buildings.

Historical GIS and Visualization

Historic hotel guest registers are used to extract data to map and analyze visitation patterns for commercial hotels in three small places in Central Pennsylvania during the late 19th century. In an era before the automobile, guestsheds reflect both the slow travel of the horse and wagon era and linkages via railroad networks to more distant places. Hotel registers in places off a railroad line generate different guestsheds than those on rail lines; those in county seats often show the influence of seasonal court sessions and county fairs. Although the application of a geographic information system (GIS) is useful for teasing out spatial variations in the data, temporal patterns are not so easily distinguished. This research reports on the use of Hotelviz, an integrated software for visual data analysis, to help confront the complex spatiotemporal trends that are to be found in the data.

The meaning of alley housing in industrial towns: examples from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Pennsylvania

Abstract During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, alley houses were an important feature in the housing landscape of many industrial cities and towns. In general, social reformers and politicians viewed this landscape negatively, but alley houses carried a different meaning for their inhabitants, and those who made income from them. An alley survey made of almost six hundred Pennsylvania communities and a more detailed analysis of the social-spatial structure of Mount Carmel, Vandergrift Borough and Vandergrift Heights suggest that alley houses were a private and small-scale housing response to rapid industrial expansion and population growth. Most likely to appear in atomised property markets where space was at a premium and larger property interests were slow to open up new residential housing tracts for immigrants and young families, alley houses represented labours response to the demand for shelter. Alley housing thus hints of organic, informal answers to everyday problems in the midst of controlled and hierarchical worlds.

Signatures of Commerce in Small-Town Hotel Guest Registers

Guest registers for six commercial hotels are analyzed to reveal everyday, nonmigratory travel patterns associated with small towns and villages in the upper Susquehanna valleys of New York and Pennsylvania at the turn of the twentieth century. The residences of guests are mapped using geographic information system (GIS) software and reveal two broad patterns of connectivity, a translocal cluster of visitors from places within the immediate vicinity and a set of visitors from more distant places up the urban system. Census and directory data identify many repeat visitors, such as hucksters and peddlers extending the reach of rural stores and merchants traveling circuits as agents of metropolitan manufacturing centers. In addition to commercial travelers, the presence of traveling entertainments, such as vaudeville acts and circuses, in hotel guest registers reveals shifts in American popular culture and entertainments on small-town Main Streets. These registers offer a fixed window onto a mobile world, and the signatures hint at the types of connections between these settlements and the outside world.

Historical Atlas of Canada: Volume III: Addressing the Twentieth Century

This is the third volume (though second to be published) of the Historial Atlas of Canada, which traces the development of Canada and its peoples from pre-historic times. Over 60 double page colour plates are presented, each giving data and explanatory text to illustrate the growth of the country. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part, the Great Transformation, from 1891 to 1929, covers a period of dramatic change in the economy, population, society, and landscape of the country. The topics include the expansion and consolidation of railways, financial institutions, resource development, settling of the prairies, the sea and livelihood in Atlantic Canada, prairie agriculture, the Great War, migration, schooling and social structure, religious adherence, recreational land, labour and strikes, and organized sport. The second part, Crisis and Response, covering the years from 1929 to 1961, devotes several plates to the Great Depression, then moves on to topics such as the Second World War, farming and fishing, retailing, society in the north, population changes, the urban system, education, social insurance, the changing work force, and national broadcasting. -after Publisher