RiverWeb is an education and outreach program started at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The mission of RiverWeb is to promote environmental education and historical and cultural awareness about rivers and their watersheds among students, educators, and their communities, and to facilitate greater citizen participation in environmental monitoring, planning, and policy-making by harnessing advanced information technologies. The RiverWeb project is currently using historic city directories to allow an opportunity to explore in unprecedented clarity the demographic evolution East St Louis during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The city directories contain a wealth of demographic information about East St Louis???s citizens, allowing for direct analysis of how racial, marital, and occupational status affected the composition of different neighborhoods in different years. By digitizing city directories, it is possible to map residential patterns within East St Louis at a higher temporal and spatial resolution than is possible through the use of the decennial census. In particular, the city directories also allow us to explore how a specific event???whether the tornado of 1896 or the 1917 race riot that shocked the country???affected population dynamics within the city.
www.riverweb.ncsa.uiuc.edu. This poster was also presented at the Second International Conference on e-Social Science in Manchester, United Kingdom and at Digital Humanities '06 in Paris, France.unpublishe
