An Archivist Goes to a Playground

Exploring and Describing Chicago Park Playgrounds
(and linked data, website design, history of urban parks…)

Introduction

I'm making this particular page as a landing page of sorts for my time during the Reclaim Open – Rewilding the Network. I'm participating for a few reasons.

  1. Because the service Reclaim Hosting has provided me is excellent and I'm happy to give back.
  2. To learn from other presenters.
  3. Because this theme really stood out to me:
Your World: Maybe it’s a blog or a domain of one’s own that is your home in the digital realm. Whether it’s all business or hobbies, pets, creative projects, parenting or sports. Share what you care about on the open web.


Reclaim Hosting has allowed me to "Share what you care about on the open web". And the thing I care about is Chicago Park playgrounds.

Background

Consult the About Page for general information, but the here is the general timeline:

  1. We (my two young children and I) started visiting a lot Chicago Parks during the pandemic but was frustrated with the information available. I am an archivist by training and realized I could potentially help solve this problem.
  2. I created lists in google docs before getting serious...
  3. I wrote rudimentary code in R (available here) that took extracted data from the City of Chicago Data Portal, reformatted and combined that data, and loaded that data into this website.
  4. Once I had this skeleton of data, I started visisting playgrounds to document them. I took photographs and notes that I then used to create detailed descriptions of each playground.

That's the general timeline. But this is supposed to be a social and community lead session - so I wanted to provide some more details and questions for dreaming and exploration.