Andrew Crighton

News Editor

Paul Sivitz, an ISU Professor of History, has been involved with a project mapping early Philadelphia since 2009, and recently has released the newest map showing free African-Americans in 1790s Philadelphia.

While still in graduate school at Montana State University, Sivitz’s  Ph.D. advisor, Billy Smith, approached him with a project idea he couldn’t refuse, a long-term historical project involving early Philadelphia, the city where Sivitz grew up.

The project is entirely extra-academic, and all of the work is done in the free time that Sivitz and Smith have. According to Sivitz, almost all of the first three years were done in the summer because there simply wasn’t any time to work on it during the academic year.

The project spawned from Smith’s idea to study the yellow fever epidemics in the early 1790s, which then grew into a larger historical study of the city over the decade leading to 1800.

The team takes all types of primary source documents such as city directories and the census data to create databases involving all types of demographics. Then, using that data, the team creates Geographic Information System maps. GIS maps allow an individual to store, analyze and manipulate information in a map.

Since creating the first maps involving the yellow fever epidemics, Sivitz and his team of colleagues and students have created nearly a thousand different maps.

“It helps us visualize data, it helps us ask different sorts of questions,” Sivitz said. “One of the things historians do is recover the past, or uncover the past, tell stories about the past.”

Making predictions based on past occurrences is not something that Sivitz is interested in, but rather the idea that if you can understand the past, maybe you can understand yourself. 

The way that the data is coded connects a person to a permanent address, and is so accurate that if given the name of a person from the period, they can place the name within one block on the correct side of the street. It’s possible that, through other databases, the team can tell you that individual’s occupation or the people they could have associated with.

One thing that Sivitz and his other team members are very proud of is that their group is the first to develop GIS maps specifically for an urban area.

Another area of pride for this group is that all of the data that the team has collected and stored is available to the public completely free of charge. The specific coding and mapping techniques are kept proprietary, but all demographic data is available to make your own map, chart or other infographic.

“Bringing information to a wider audience that isn’t a group of academics is very important to me personally,” Sivitz said.

The long-term goal of the project is to inspire other scholars and academics to pick up the torch, according to Sivitz, and continue looking into other decades of early Philadelphia.

Sivitz and Smith simply have too much data already to consider looking at other decades. Not only is the data they have still incredibly full of information, but there are other sources that could give even more detail about people’s lives from this decade.