Gathering Places Expanded: Organizing Broad Qualitative Religious Data
Mentor 1
Christopher Cantwell
Start Date
10-5-2022 10:00 AM
Description
The project “Gathering Places: Religion and Community in Milwaukee” was started in 2018 with the goal of documenting the history of Milwaukee’s places of worship (e.g. churches, mosques, synagogues, sacred sites, and more). Places of worship in Milwaukee were researched and visited, and reports were created to be displayed on the Gathering Places website (https://liblamp.uwm.edu/omeka/gatheringplaces/). Gathering Places is a great hub to showcase specific research done on Milwaukee’s places of worship, but it tended to lack broad historical religious data. What is the best way to organize and display broad qualitative religious data using modern technology? In the Fall of 2021, work began on a database. By transcribing religious information from the Milwaukee City Directories into a database in Microsoft Excel, Corinne Kronschnabel began charting the geographical journeys of Milwaukee’s places of worship as far back as 1862. In the database every unique address and place of worship are assigned a key, referred to as the “Location ID” and “Gathering Place ID” respectively. Not only can one see the denomination, ethnicity, and leadership of a place of worship in the database but they can also see, for example, how many different places of worship are associated with a single address. In the Fall of 2021 the focus was on transcribing and assigning keys. This Spring semester Nahomi Hernandez has continued transcribing data and assigning keys, and Corinne Kronschnabel has begun transferring the data over to Microsoft Access. Utilizing Microsoft Access will allow for greater analysis of the relationships between the data, specifically between the two keys. Moving from Excel to Access will better organize and display the qualitative religious data, and allow us to prepare to move into the next phase of the project: creating a map of the database information using ArcGIS.
Gathering Places Expanded: Organizing Broad Qualitative Religious Data
The project “Gathering Places: Religion and Community in Milwaukee” was started in 2018 with the goal of documenting the history of Milwaukee’s places of worship (e.g. churches, mosques, synagogues, sacred sites, and more). Places of worship in Milwaukee were researched and visited, and reports were created to be displayed on the Gathering Places website (https://liblamp.uwm.edu/omeka/gatheringplaces/). Gathering Places is a great hub to showcase specific research done on Milwaukee’s places of worship, but it tended to lack broad historical religious data. What is the best way to organize and display broad qualitative religious data using modern technology? In the Fall of 2021, work began on a database. By transcribing religious information from the Milwaukee City Directories into a database in Microsoft Excel, Corinne Kronschnabel began charting the geographical journeys of Milwaukee’s places of worship as far back as 1862. In the database every unique address and place of worship are assigned a key, referred to as the “Location ID” and “Gathering Place ID” respectively. Not only can one see the denomination, ethnicity, and leadership of a place of worship in the database but they can also see, for example, how many different places of worship are associated with a single address. In the Fall of 2021 the focus was on transcribing and assigning keys. This Spring semester Nahomi Hernandez has continued transcribing data and assigning keys, and Corinne Kronschnabel has begun transferring the data over to Microsoft Access. Utilizing Microsoft Access will allow for greater analysis of the relationships between the data, specifically between the two keys. Moving from Excel to Access will better organize and display the qualitative religious data, and allow us to prepare to move into the next phase of the project: creating a map of the database information using ArcGIS.
