Using New Media to Map the History of the Information Economy

I have recently begun a new project that explores the political culture and spatial dynamics of what became known as “post-industrial society” in the twentieth century.  This project examines the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina as a new kind of landscape in the urban South – a sprawling agglomeration of cities, industries, and universities between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, where state leaders sought to cultivate high-tech development, beginning in 1959.  I seek to extend the insights of James Cobb’s study of Southern industrialization, which illustrated how businessmen and politicians in the Carolinas and other states offered generous incentives to lure manufacturing enterprises to the region in the early to mid-twentieth century.  The project also brings a fresh perspective to the urban history of the South by eschewing a focus on a single city (such as, say, Charlotte or Atlanta) for an analysis of how public policy shaped a group of interconnected sites, treating the Triangle itself as a kind of “city.”  My goal is to understand how the growth of industries like pharmaceuticals and software reshaped the experience of everyday life for both native North Carolinians and the migrants who came from all over the world to work there.  Visualizing the spatial transformation of the landscape offers one way of understanding the economic, political, and demographic changes that have made the Triangle such a distinctive locality in the South as a whole.
This poster session will employ several different media to illustrate how the growth of information industries reshaped urban spaces in the Research Triangle, the United States, and regions throughout the world.  I am interested in how the concept of a “research park” evolved in the US, providing a model that has been copied in numerous countries since Stanford University pioneered the idea in the 1950s.  The Research Triangle serves as my primary case study; I wish to understand both how North Carolinians adapted the park concept to their own circumstances, and the role that the Triangle served as a model for similar projects elsewhere.  I will use geographic information systems (GIS) technology to produce maps that reveal the temporal and spatial progression of research parks, as they appeared in California, Massachusetts, and North Carolina, and subsequently spread to localities as diverse as Australia, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates.   Drawing on urban planning documents, university archives, and census figures, I will construct visual illustrations of the Triangle, Dubai’s Knowledge Village, and Australia’s Adelaide Research Park to provide viewers with a way to assess the social and political implications of different planning strategies.  Several of these resources will also appear on an interactive DVD that will allow conference attendees to explore the historical timeline of research park development in the late twentieth century.