Visualizing the Mobility of Population in Harrisburg, 1900–30

Our third presentation will introduce the geospatial data and demonstrate the potential of GIS to visualize human mobility between 1900 and 1930. We begin with a survey of the work of faculty and students to create GIS maps of the city from 1902 and 1928 encoded with federal census data. We will then show how this data can be used to illustrate human mobility in the cityscape, including global immigration, in-migration more generally (the city’s population increased 15% per decade), and population displacement as the construction of the Capitol Park uprooted several thousand individuals of the Old Eighth Ward.