Slaughterhouses, Land Use Conflicts, & Neighborhood Identity: A Digital Mapping and Topic Modeling Project
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Date
2018-04-13
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Abstract
Louisville’s Butchertown neighborhood is a mixed residential, industrial, and commercial area that from the nineteenth through early-twentieth centuries was dominated by animal industries such as stock yards, slaughterhouses, soap factories, and tanneries. In 1892 there were more than 50 such businesses in Butchertown, which sits on 50 acres—less than one square mile—of land. Today, there are three sites of animal industry in the neighborhood, including a large industrial slaughterhouse called JBS Swift. The 20-acre stock yard, where cattle and hogs were auctioned to slaughterhouses, only closed in 1999. This poster presents research on how the presence and subsequent decline of a dominant neighborhood industry inflects discourses of neighborhood production, including those that arise over conflicts over land use and the creation of a neighborhood identity. Using a combination of digital mapping and topic modeling methods enabled the discovery of spatialized discourse,revealing the ways in which capitalis enacted and produced within the context of the neighborhood's form. The digital map marks the sites of these industries as well as the changes to those sites over time, from 1892 to 2018, while topic models generated from newspaper articles about Butchertown uncover discourses surrounding the community and neighborhood development. Putting the topic models and the map in conversation with one another demonstrates that as Butchertown’s core industry declined, conflicts over the ideal way to extract value from the “fixed capital” (Harvey, 1985, p.6) of the built environment emerged, and continue today.
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Mapping, Digital Humanities, Topic Modeling, Identity, Slaughterhouse
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