Avery Matteo '22
Visitors can add or remove map layers by selecting the checkboxes in the panel to the left. Clicking on the map’s pins will reveal the newspaper issue the location is in and its number of appearances in the issue.
My interest in Bryn Mawr students’ geopolitical awareness began while exploring College News issues written during World War I. I noticed that the tone and scope of focus were quite different from issues published during carefree, campus-oriented periods of peace, and decided to embark on a more expansive mapping project that depicts international place names in issues published during World War I (1914-1918), World War II (1939-1945), the Korean War (1950-1953) and the Vietnam War up to 1968. I was only able to track the Vietnam War until 1968 because The College News was dissolved to form the Bi-College News, marking the conclusion of our corpus.
To bring this visualization to life, I used the team’s spaCy Named Entity Recognition (NER) code for Geopolitical Entity (GPE) extraction. My team member Marianela also created a cleaned version of the CSV file that was produced — filtering the results to omit non-place names and unrecognizable words — that I used for further data manipulation. Next, I separated this whole-corpus CSV file into chunks encompassing the years associated with each war. I then uploaded these files as individual layers on Google MyMaps so that website visitors have the ability to add or remove layers that represent each wartime period.
While my intention is to leave this map up for individual interpretation, the College News wartime issues seem to reveal that Bryn Mawr’s student body was largely comprised of engaged global citizens who delegated attention not only to pressing campus issues, but also to salient political concerns that reached beyond the scope of the College.