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TITLE: Quadruple Take: Modeling visibility at historical children’s institutions
Speaker: Paulina Przystupa
March 22, 2023 ARF Lunch Talk
Abstract: Viewshed analysis is a powerful tool employed by archaeologists to understand the experiences of people in the past. At their core, viewshed or visibility analyses estimate where people could see. Such estimations, however, rely on myriad assumptions including similarities between the past and present landscape–in topography and content–as well as statistical issues involved in quantification–such as the modified area unit problem (MAUP). To explore the influence of these assumptions, this talk will examine different ways of modeling and quantifying visibility from late 19th and early 20th century children’s institutions. By changing how I reconstructed historical topography, categorized modern land cover use in different ways, and defined meaningful distances I assess the influence these assumptions have on answering questions of change through time and of differences between children’s institutions designed for wards of different backgrounds.