by Riley Viskochil

This semester I am taking community GIS, a class offered at the University of Georgia that is centered around community organizations through map making. Since I am majoring in ecology, most of my experience in GIS has been focused on wildlife and land use data. I thought this class would be more focused on the methodology of GIS or similar projects I have done. However, this class could not be more different from what I thought it would be. Throughout this semester I have learned valuable things about myself, the community of Athens, GA, and how maps have the power to affect peoples’ lives. This class has made me question my positionality as a student at the University of Georgia and a person outside the black community of Athens, as well as the roles I play in my community of Athens and in society as a whole. This has become clear in the community aid projects done in Athens and how we have worked with them.

​In early February, when the trees had no leaves and the cold air bit at our face, our class made our first trip to Brooklyn Cemetery, a historically Black cemetery nestled in the craze of Athens. Brooklyn started interring members of the black community of Athens in the 1800s and stayed active until the late 1970s. While we walked through the cemetery, our thoughts were accompanied by the crunch of leaves and thumps as our feet bumped into tree roots. Brooklyn has been a victim of severe neglect having been constructed in the aftermath of American chattel slavery and active throughout the era of Jim Crow. A typical image of a cemetery that I am familiar with is one of short grass and clear paths, an image of which Brooklyn does not possess. Compared to other cemeteries in Athens, where most of the people interred were white, Brooklyn did not and still does not have the same resources to maintain its grounds and inventories. Because of this, the cemetery has withstood extreme neglect and overgrowth. The paths are made of dirt, there are sunken and various unmarked graves, and vegetation and tall trees whose roots have intertwined with the grave sites are scattered throughout the landscape. This view was hard to stomach seeing it for the first time. I remember at this moment thinking that letting a final resting place fall into such disrepair was disrespectful to the memory of those buried there.

However, while still devastating and unjust to the people buried in Brooklyn Cemetery, I have learned this semester that it is also not fair to people that have faced oppression to view them solely as victims. Throughout history, people who have faced great adversities have triumphed in their fight for justice and equality. Many people have helped me come to see this but one notable person is Ms. Linda Davis, a member of the Athens community who works with the organization “Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery” that is helping to bring the history of the cemetery to the community. She has given us priceless knowledge and insight that we have used to work on our project this semester. At one meeting we had with her, she shared an experience she had one day in the cemetery. She remembered it being a spring day in which the trees’ leaves began to grow back and rays of light shone through the canopy that covered the graves. Upon looking up, she spotted a deer foraging on the grass. The deer noticed her and they held a moment of eye contact before the deer trotted away. Her story made me realize that although  Brooklyn did not have the images of cemeteries that I am familiar with, it has its own sense of beauty in the face of neglect. The gravesites of families buried there have acted as a sanctuary that has cultivated new life. The roots of trees have intertwined with various graves and thus the essence of new life is connected to previous one. The vegetation supports animals in the surrounding area. While we do not have the resources to give Brooklyn a makeover, nor the will to disrupt the peaceful nature it has grown, there are other methods to give a sense of justice to those buried there. In this aspect arose the idea for our project this semester.

In previous years, other community GIS classes have compiled geographical data about the cemetery, and have located unmarked graves and provided coordinates for others. This semester, we have been more focused on the lives of the people there before they were interred at Brooklyn. Throughout this term, we have compiled genealogical data on a number of families in order to tell their stories. We focused on things like census records and city directories to find out more about them. By solely looking at a grave, you cannot tell how a person lived, but now with the information we have, we know different family relations, where they worked, and how they fit into their communities. It sounds silly to say, but seeing this information about peoples’ lives made the project seem more real. Through the use of the geographical data, we can see the routes they might have taken to commute to work. Although this was just a small part of a person’s everyday life, it is just one small detail we’ve come across that has fleshed out someone’s life.

The geographical and biographical data was put into ESRI story maps that show the family history and the lives they lived in Athens. We plan to present our story maps at Historic Athens history hour and tell the lives of the families of Brooklyn history, not just as victims of neglect, but everyday people who contributed to society, who loved and laughed with their family, and were valuable members to their communities.
 
Riley Viskochil | University of Georgia

Keywords: Community GIS, Brooklyn Cemetery

by Md Rakibuzzaman

Community geography is an important subset of geography that emphasizes the importance of local knowledge and participatory methods in geographic research. To acquire community knowledge, build relationships, and conduct participatory research, this course is specifically designed to combine theoretical knowledge with an overview of different GIScience techniques under the guidance of Dr. Jerry Shannon. As an ongoing effort to achieve the course objectives, we as a class are working with the community members of Brooklyn Cemetery and exploring its historical background.

Before diving deeper into the main focus of this blog post, I want to provide a brief glimpse of Brooklyn Cemetery. The Brooklyn Cemetery in Athens, Georgia, stands as a testament to the resilience and history of the Black community. Founded in the late 19th century, this burial ground has witnessed generations of African American families who, despite systemic marginalization, have remained steadfast in preserving their heritage. Yet, like many historic Black cemeteries, Brooklyn Cemetery faces threats of erasure—both physically, through encroachment and neglect, and historically, through the fading of collective memory. In the rest of this blog post, I want to focus on how community geography can be an effective tool in uncovering historical narratives, examining the factors affecting these communities, and passing down information through mapping, digital archives, and storytelling to the descendants of those buried here.

To undertake this kind of work, we as a class started off by discussing important theoretical concepts, which I believe is an essential step before engaging with community members or observing a sensitive site. I will briefly discuss some of these theories and connect them with the work we are doing. In the first class, we discussed a central conceptual framework consisting of three primary principles for implementing community-driven projects: (1) Who, (2) Why, and (3) How. This framework provides us with a basic foundation for understanding how community geography (CG) works, how CG empowers a community, the types of stakeholders involved, and the importance of collaborative research. Also, we discussed about Hyphen-spaces, which helped us to understand our positionality in the context of Brooklyn cemetery. We then moved on to another core concept of Black Geography—Plantation Futures by McKittrick—which discusses the history of slavery, contemporary racial and spatial inequalities, and the embedded social and institutional hierarchies that have paved the way for systemic oppression. She also explores the ways in which Black communities resist these forces through the concept of the “Plot.” Simply put, the Plot represents a space of survival, autonomy, and cultural continuity in opposition to the plantation system. To connect these theoretical concepts with practical applications, I, along with some talented scholars, am exploring a particular family plot (e.g., the Daniel family) within Brooklyn Cemetery.
 
The class has been fortunate to have the guidance of community members via a relationship with the Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery, who have helped situate Brooklyn Cemetery within a larger local context in order to understand the significance of this work. Linda E. Davis (representative of Brooklyn cemetery) came to speak with our class back in February, briefly discussing the significance of Brooklyn, the people, and eventually raising a number of questions that we have been exploring through the semester. She pointed out important issues, such as why the number of Black students at UGA has decreased and why Black students continue to face barriers in accessing quality education. In class, we have been thinking about how to carry these questions and stories forward and utilize the power of Community GIS to preserve and share this information with current descendants. In the lab, our group has been extracting and compiling historical data from various sources such as census records, FamilySearch, city directories, and the Ancestry Library. We started by creating conventional maps of the family’s gravesite using QGIS. Many of us have little to no firsthand experience with QGIS, so I would say this has been a great starting point for making maps and presenting spatial data in the most visually effective way possible. However, through Community GIS, we are thinking beyond traditional map design—we aim to present historical data in a way that tangibly connects the past to the present for the community. 

Our work doesn’t stop there. In response to Ms. Linda’s concerns and questions, we are also considering how to present our findings directly to the community, fostering a deeper and more meaningful connection to the cemetery through a public history lens. One approach we are taking is creating ArcGIS StoryMaps, which combine text, media, and maps to present historical information in a format that resonates with community members seeking knowledge about their ancestors or their own family history. This initiative not only archives historical records but also serves as an educational resource, allowing both community members and researchers to engage with Brooklyn Cemetery’s history in a meaningful way.

The University of Georgia (UGA) is a prime example of what Katherine McKittrick has referred to as “plantation geography,” as it is rooted in the exploitation of enslaved Africans and the dispossession of Indigenous lands from the very origins of the institution, a history that has still not been reconciled at present. I am now thinking about how, after completing our project, we might be able to answer some of the concerns raised by Linda E. Davis. What other dimensions—such as institutional and social factors—need to be addressed to fully understand these issues? As part of our ongoing efforts, how can we build trust-based relationships with the community and strengthen their capacity through our digital archive and enhanced StoryMaps? Additionally, it would be valuable to design 3D maps that incorporate sections of the gravesite and various landscape architectural elements, making Brooklyn Cemetery’s historical significance more aesthetic and visible to the public. 

Md Rakibuzzaman is a first-year master's student studying Geography. Rakib is passionate about exploring advances in GIScience and machine learning to visualize spatial data and make data-driven decisions. In the long term, he plans to utilize these skills in his thesis and carry them forward beyond graduation.

Keywords: Community GIS, GIScience, Brooklyn Cemetery, Black History, Historical Preservation

by Rajath Prabhakar

Brooklyn Cemetery
Established in 1882, the Brooklyn Cemetery is the final resting place for residents of the Hawthorne area of West Athens. It was one of the first Black cemeteries established in Athens. Since then, it has been the victim of nature, time, and disrepair. In more recent times, there have been efforts to restore the cemetery, removing truckloads of debris over time. Our project sought to go one step further and bring the stories of the families buried in this cemetery to life. We sought to put the words of McKittrick into action, when she conceptualizes “plantation futures: a conceptualization of time-space that tracks the plantation toward the prison and the impoverished and destroyed city Sectors” (McKittrick 2). Our project also sought to serve as a guide for urban planners and for broader political action. As Andrea Roberts put it, “awareness of where a colony exists, or in some cases, once was located, opens the door to access. Gaining invited entry into a colony’s social system, to speak with those who call these places “home,” or to observe shared traditions is key to understanding these places and their history”(Roberts 15).

Many of these graves, 40 to be precise, are of Black WW1, WW2, and Korean War veterans. Recently, we met with the two community members that showed up. The point of this meeting was to discuss our progress with the project of preserving the genealogical histories of the families buried within Brooklyn Cemetery. This progress check was met with relative enthusiasm; if nothing else, it was nice to see that people liked the work that we did very much and brought them joy. But it sort of ended there; there are still insufficiently answered questions.

For example:
a. Why would people that aren't immediate descendants of these families care about these people?
b. What does this add that we don't already know? Specifically the broader history of the Black experience in America, even in Athens, Georgia specifically.

The disrepair of the cemetery is a continuation of the war on Black America
But the disrepair seen at Brooklyn Cemetery is just one more point in a long history of oppression and white supremacy seen in the United States, and in Athens alone. Whether in life or in death, Black people are treated as second-class citizens in Athens as well as in the US more broadly. Whether it is Brooklyn Cemetery, Baldwin Hall, or the Athens Housing Crisis most recently, the undercurrent of white supremacy is clearly seen.

Baldwin Hall
On November 17, 2015, the renovation of Baldwin Hall resulted in human remains being dug up. They would later be found to be the remains of former slaves. As is a theme with any issue involving the University of Georgia, the administration obstructed the process of justice at every turn,from not consulting the black community of Athens on the reinterment of those remains, prohibiting Athens community members from viewing said reinterment, and an unwillingness to address the legacy of slavery present.

An Underclass at UGA
A leading employer in Georgia and the dominant force in the Athens economy, Athens has a poverty rate of 38%(!), a strong indicator of its continuing legacy of exploitation. As of this writing, despite making up nearly 28% of residents, only 7.7% of students and 5% of faculty are Black. Breaking this down further, by occupation, only 7% of administrators, and as mentioned before, 5% of faculty are Black. However, Black people make up 44% of service employees, the lowest paid workers at UGA.

In addition to UGA’s poor treatment of its majority-Black service workers, the university has also taken steps to abandon its pretense of caring for its Black students. Take, for example, its replacement of the very specific C.L.A.S.S (Continuing the Legacy of African-American Student Success) Advocates with a nebulous “Resident Belonging Ambassador” this past year. The program was essential to making Black students feel welcome at UGA, and find community in the predominantly white institution (PWI). Its replacement cuts the direct support Black students received from the Class Advocate program, a logical endpoint to increasing roadblocks to the program, from not being provided the names of Black students, to being treated as RAs rather than as a position specific to Black students. 

Conclusion
The Brooklyn Cemetery stands as a stark symbol of systemic neglect. Its deterioration mirrors the broader injustices faced by the Black community in Athens - from the desecration of the graves of slaves underneath Baldwin Hall to the economic and educational disparities perpetuated by the University of Georgia.

Rajath Prabhakar is a 4th year Statistics major at UGA

Keywords: Brooklyn Cemetery, systemic racism, slavery

Works Cited
Enlighten Media Productions. “[CC] below Baldwin: How an Expansion Project Unearthed a University’s Legacy of Slavery.” YouTube, 9 Oct. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwQcTfGqANQ. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

McKittrick, Katherine. "Plantation Futures." Small Axe, vol. 17 no. 3, 2013, p. 1-15. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/532740.
Roberts, Andrea. (2017). Documenting and Preserving Texas Freedom Colonies. Texas Heritage Magazine. 2. 14.

Sawyer, Dawn. ““A Long Time Coming”: C.L.A.S.S. Advocate Program’s Removal Worries Black Students.” The Red & Black, 4 Apr. 2024, www.redandblack.com/uganews/a-long-time-coming-c-l-a-s-s-advocate-program-s-removal-worries-black/article_ef4dd9b4-f247-11ee-b044-b3e421b2c428.html.
 
 
 
 
 

by Vijay Murthy

I have felt dissatisfied with this project for much of the class, and I have had time to think about why. Here, I evaluate our praxis so far based on the criteria set forth in the paper “Cartographies of Black Presence” by Rachelle Berry, Amber Orozco, Maya Henderson, Aidan Hysjulien, Maya Rao, and Jerry Shannon of the Community Mapping Lab. I believe these criteria reflect a set of values rooted in liberatory community geography, and we should make sure to follow them.
​
The first criterion is centering “Black livingness rather than absence” (Berry et al. 20xx, 3). On this point, I believe our project is on the right track. By highlighting the lives of the people under the gravestones (or lack of them), we make clear that Brooklyn Cemetery is not merely a neglected graveyard, it is the final resting place of real people with descendants who are still alive. However, one obstacle we have run into is that our portrayals of these individuals are mostly limited to scraps of demographic data: employment, dates of birth, places of residence, number of children. Centering Black subjectivities necessitates looking for personal narratives, and so far we have been unsuccessful in contacting descendants and learning their family stories.

The second criterion is “[m]aking visible the institutions, structures, and processes that disrupt
Black life” (Berry et al. 20xx, 4). I feel that our project completely fails here, at least for now. The bulk of our time has been spent on researching demographic data of people in certain families. A trained eye will notice traces of systemic oppression in this data, from the most common professions to the neighborhoods all the residences seem to be in. But the way we present this data does not highlight that this is a symptom of oppression, let alone the causes of this oppression. In not doing so, it risks naturalizing said oppression. Some ideas I have for improving this are presenting redlining and segregation maps alongside residence maps, providing context for the professions and wages of family members, and incorporating stories of facing and resisting racism that descendants can share with us. But here again we run into the problem of not having contact with descendants to tell us these stories.

The third criterion is “[e]xpanding capacity through reciprocal, trust-based relationships” (Berry et al. 20xx, 4). I feel that we have much work to do here as well. While this project originated with the suggestion of Mrs. Linda Davis, a longtime partner of the Community Geography Lab, and has kept her in the loop, it has had very limited success in bringing in more community members. When we held an open interest meeting, which Mrs. Davis promoted through her networks, only two other community members showed up. It’s good that they showed interest in our work, but we need more community buy-in. The problem goes beyond one community meeting; Mrs. Davis has not been able to get my group in touch with any Wingfield family members who can provide their input, and other groups have run into the same issue. We must seriously ask ourselves why that is. Is this project even desired by the family members and community? Are we contributing anything they find important or useful? 

The fourth criterion is “[c]reating research products that support Black futurity” (Berry et al. 20xx, 5). In other words, does our project address local social goals of the Black community? One could argue that it does, as it highlights the importance of funding renovation of the cemetery and provides people with more information about the people buried in the cemetery. But whose social goals are these? Do Mrs. Davis’ priorities reflect the priorities of Black Athenians, especially young Black Athenians, those who will be responsible for building the future? While we do not know yet, I have seen little evidence to suggest this might be the case. Even the scheduled time of the first community meeting, Wednesday at 2 PM, does not reflect an orientation towards Black Athenians of all ages. It’s no wonder that both community members who showed up to the meeting were retirees, those are the only people available then! If we want to support Black futurity, we should select projects which speak to those who will ultimately build it.

The fifth criterion is “[d]eveloping cartographic practices that represent the embodied
experiences of Black communities” (Berry et al. 20xx, 5). The paper recommends directly incorporating the “voices, faces, and stories of Athens’ Black residence” into our final product, rather than reducing people to mere data points (Berry et al. 20xx, 5). This is something we have not been able to do, not due to malpractice, but because we lack the voices, faces, and stories to incorporate. If we cannot find enough community members to give us feedback on our project, we should perhaps consider that they do not find our work important.

The underlying problem here is a lack of community engagement. This is a sharp contrast to the projects previously undertaken by the Community Mapping Lab. The Linnentown project provided an estimation of how much money displaced homeowners are owed by UGA, actively forwarding the reparations struggle. As an organizer, I made use of the Community Mapping Lab’s eviction project to choose which apartment complexes to focus on distributing eviction defense manuals in. By contrast, it does not appear that we have been able to contribute anything except a pretty data sheet to people who never asked for it. I could be missing the bigger picture here, but I do not think that this project so far has lived up to the values of the Community Mapping Lab, and I hope future classes learn from our mistakes.

by Zachary Mitchell

The definition of Geography is that it is the study of the physical features of a landscape. Geographers represent this study of the landscape through many different means such as maps, spreadsheets, scientific research papers, etc.. Geographers can provide an analysis and study of the physical features of a landscape, but what about the stories behind those landscapes? 

In the Spring 2025 semester I had the privilege of taking the Community GIS (Geographic Information Science) course at the University of Georgia. This is a service learning class that provides students with an opportunity to apply the academic skills that they have learned to a community-identified problem or need. In this course, our class was tasked with telling the stories of families buried in Brooklyn Cemetery. Brooklyn Cemetery is a historically black cemetery that has been established in Athens, Georgia since 1882. The cemetery is directly behind Clarke Central Middle School and Holy Cross Lutheran Church . The cemetery isn’t directly visible due to this, and our goal in the course was to create more visibility through geographic analysis . We analyzed the space through many different types of GIScience-based skills such as data collection, QGIS, and ESRI ArcGIS Story Mapping, but the most important skill we had to encompass in our time in the course was the way in which we interacted with the community and its members. 

At the start of the course we began to hone our skills of how to respectfully work in the community through a geographic viewpoint. One of the papers we read that I found to be most helpful in learning this skill was “Doing Community Geography” by Heather Fischer et. al. In the reading, Fischer provides us with three principles to abide by when doing CG (community geography) work: Who, Why, and How. The Who describes who we’re working with in our CG work, in this case the Brooklyn community. This includes living descendants of family members who are buried in the cemetery but also those who work in/with the cemetery. One person who comes to mind who has helped guide the work we have done is one of the founders of ‘Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery’, Linda Davis. She has helped restore, rebuild, and commemorate the cemetery grounds and the individuals that are laid to rest there. The Why is the justification and benefits of our work in the community, and the work that Ms. Linda and Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery have done aligns with ours; we want to help increase the visibility of Brooklyn Cemetery by commemorating the stories of the families who are buried in the cemetery. We’ve attempted to increase the visibility of Brooklyn through community events where we presented the results of our findings to living family members. The How is the types of geographic methodologies that we use to do our work, in this case data collection and the use of ArcGIS Story Maps.  We used ArcGIS to create maps of the cemetery and the residences of family members, giving a brief history of their lives.

In our research of the families buried in Brooklyn Cemetery, we decided to analyze the 7 largest families in the cemetery. My group was tasked with researching the Daniel family. We started our research by gathering data on just who was buried in our family plot, that of which we found in a directory of Brooklyn Cemetery created by Meriwether Rhoades. In the directory we found the names and birth/death dates of 10 individuals from the Daniel family. From there we began to collect data on the family members by using sources such as FamilySearch, FindAGrave, City Directories, and Census entries. We found data on family member’s residency, their relationship to the head of the residency, birth place, race, sex, marital status, occupation, literacy level, and more. Once we had gathered a satisfactory and complete amount of data on our family members, it was time to create a story map to help tell the individual stories of family members buried in the cemetery.

ArcGIS StoryMaps is a story authoring web-based application that allows you to share maps in the context of narrative text and other multimedia content. In general our class’ story maps all follow the same structure: an introduction of the family, a family tree showing different generations of family members that differentiates between those who are buried in the cemetery and those who aren’t, a map tour of the gravesites, family history over different years, and a spotlight on a specific family member. For the Daniel family, their history in Athens-Clarke county traces back to 1880, where Philip and Margaret Daniel’s marriage registration was found in FamilySearch. From there we found multiple years of census data that showed where certain family members lived, and even some death reports showing when family members passed away.  For example we learned the histories of Judge and Settie Daniel, 2 long time Athens- Clarke county residents. We were able to find multiple years of their family history including census records spanning 50+ years and marriage/death certificates. We were also able to find information on their children and grandchildren through census data.

In the grand scheme of my time in the course, I feel as though the work we have done in helping create visibility to Brooklyn Cemetery is truly valuable and important. By letting Brooklyn cemetery continue to be vulnerable to being forgotten due to no visibility by the community, these stories face the risk of being forgotten. Geographers can help increase visibility of the cemetery through creating maps and outreaching to the community to show their findings and garner more interest in telling and preserving these stories.  By doing this, we can create a memorialization of people’s histories who could be forgotten to time.
​

by Madi McFarland

When I registered for Community GIS with Dr. Shannon earlier this spring, I didn’t give it too much thought. The class had an open seat, filled the last gap in my schedule, and would give me the final credits I needed to complete my certificate in Geographic Information Science. I did not expect my final geography course to fundamentally change the way I thought about my position as a student at the University of Georgia.

Coming into this class, GIS was a set of tools I was learning to use. I dutifully sat in front of the high performance computers during weekly lab periods and completed assignments accompanied by step-by-step instructions on how to present geographic data that I was mostly disconnected to. While it was fundamental for gaining skills in using programs like ArcGIS, it was often technical, abstract. This semester, I had the opportunity to become personally invested in the data. It wasn’t just about mapping features, it was about mapping lives, histories, and absences.

I found myself making regular trips to Brooklyn Cemetery, a historically Black burial ground quietly nestled west of the University of Georgia campus. The site is more akin to a hiking trail than what you might envision when you think of a cemetery. In place of the neatly manicured lawns and paved roads of nearby cemeteries like Oconee Hill, there are piles of brush and dusty dirt pathways. PVC pipes by patches of sunken ground denote the locations of unmarked graves. Brooklyn is maintained by a small group of dedicated stewards that serve as caretakers for the site and advocates for the families interred there, but apart from that, the city of Athens has seemingly forgotten about it. This is not by coincidence.
Katherine McKittrick’s paper “Plantation Futures” describes the legacy of the plantation- not just on a material scale, but as a conceptual framework that continues to manifest in structures of power that disenfranchise people of color to this day. These systems predominantly see minorities from low-income communities doing the bulk of the work for little pay, while a small number of people in charge profit. They can be incredibly difficult to escape, as they inherently enforce a dichotomy of poverty and power. After reading the paper, I began recognizing plantation structures that quietly persist all around us- prisons, agricultural industries, resorts, and even universities.

As a student at the University of Georgia, I’ve come to realize the city of Athens as one such plantation geography, shaped by a deep history of land dispossession and enslavement. Historically Black neighborhoods and cultural areas have faced decades of erasure and displacement, often at the hands of administrative action by the school. “Hot Corner”, located on the intersection Washington and Hull downtown, was once the most prosperous Black business district in the city. Black presence is still very much there, but it has changed shape through gentrification and expansion practices. Linnentown, a lively neighborhood along Baxter Street, was seized by the University of Georgia in the 1960s to make space for new residence halls. More recently, an on-campus renovation project at Baldwin Hall uncovered the remains of 105

individuals of African descent- likely those of enslaved people whose labor built the University. This discovery was tremendously mishandled by school administration, who attempted to quietly reinterred the remains at a historically segregated cemetery away from the eyes of the media and likely descendants.
Despite major displacements and mishandlings, it is important to recognize that Black life in Athens persists. “Cartographies of Black Presence: Mapping Praxis through Community Geography and Black Geographies” by Rachelle Berry et al. presents GIS as a powerful tool for preserving Black history and elevating Black futures. Rather than focusing solely on displacement, there is an opportunity to center livingness. As UGA affiliates working with the legacy of Brooklyn Cemetery, effectively doing so requires both a dedication to amplifying the stories of the people buried there and a commitment to repairing decades of broken trust between the University and Black Athens residents.

This class pushed me to confront my own positionality. I am not from Athens, I am not a person of color, and I have no personal ties to Brooklyn Cemetery, but as a student, I am a participant in a system that has long benefited from Black erasure. This recognition comes with responsibility. As outsiders, we must seek to engage with those whose histories have been suppressed and give them agency in how their spatial histories will be represented. Community mapping asks us to consider who we are in relation to a space, and what it means to work with communities, rather than just mapping on them. I now carry a deep awareness of how my skills can be used to not just represent geographies, but to advocate for the histories within them.

Madi McFarland is a fourth-year student at the University of Georgia. She is pursuing a dual Bachelors and Masters Degree in Ecology with a GIS certificate.

Keywords: plantation geography, cartographies of black presence, positionality​

by Liam England

Participating in the Community GIS course has been a rewarding experience. The nexus of the course is about how UGA students can use the technical tools and practices of the GIS field to connect with local history and tell the story of a place and a community – in our case, Brooklyn Cemetery, a historic Black burial ground here in Athens. Due to a lack of financial resources, the cemetery experienced a period of neglect beginning in the 1980s, but it is now being cared for by dedicated community members and the organization Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery. Our class has been contributing to this effort by working to understand and share the stories held within its grounds through the creation of online resources like storymaps.

Like many GIS courses that teach software and data analysis, this class provided me with opportunities to learn those skills. But what has really resonated with me, and for good reason, is the human side of this work. Visiting Brooklyn Cemetery for the first time definitely shifted my perspective and my expectations of what a cemetery can look like. Instead of a neat, orderly space with mowed grass and uniform headstones that I had pictured, it was a sprawling, wooded area with many graves marked only by PVC pipes, or not at all. Seeing the many types of markers representing past lives alongside visible signs of past neglect underscored the profound importance of our project. This contrast prompted me to think about how we, as temporary student researchers, can respectfully and accurately share the stories of people who have been memorialized in this space.

For the past couple of months, two other classmates and I have been researching the Horton family -- one of many families with plots in Brooklyn Cemetery -- to create a storymap about them. This involved trying to piece together details about their lives through census records and city directories. I personally found this research both worthwhile and reminiscent of my own genealogical explorations, and my group and I were able to learn more about the family in the process. One particularly interesting thing we found out was that descendants and relatives of the Horton family buried in Brooklyn Cemetery have resided in the same house in Athens since the 1940s, revealing a tangible link between the past and present beyond the cemetery grounds. However, outside the dry biographical details conveyed in public records, we don’t really know much who the Horton family was and what their lives were like. My group and I are hoping to have a conversation with the family members who still live in Athens and are trying to get in touch with them. Not only is this an important step in learning much more about the family, it is essential in undertaking this work to acknowledge that we are attempting to tell the story of a family that isn’t ours, and that our information is incomplete and perhaps inaccurate.

Creating the storymap had its technical challenges. Sometimes the limitations of the platform made it tricky to present the Horton family's story in the manner that we envisioned. Issues like these are an important lesson that while technology is powerful, it has its limits, and we need to be prepared to work around these limitations while ensuring that the integrity of the stories centered in our community-engaged work remains our priority. While modern technology has undeniably streamlined impactful participatory mapping actions like sharing locations and

information, this project highlighted the irreplaceable value of personal connection: each participant's positionality and the significance of the topic or area to them. Even with technological tools, community GIS fundamentally involves mapping people's stories and their connections to place, a task I believe inherently requires human connection, emotion, and empathy.

Visiting Brooklyn Cemetery later in the semester, after weeks of research, and standing in the area where members of the Horton family are buried, was a meaningful moment. These weren't just names on a page or on a tombstone anymore. This experience made it clear that our work in this course can turn data into really personal and meaningful narratives. I hope our work helps others learn more about the history within Brooklyn Cemetery, and I hope to continue being engaged in work that is not only personally interesting, but beneficial to the community after graduating from UGA.

Liam England is a third-year undergraduate at UGA majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Geography with a certificate in Geographic Information Science. He has been a part of CML since Fall 2024.

Keywords: positionality, Brooklyn Cemetery, research, Athens

by Beckham Clime

Birdwatching has trained my brain to seek overgrowth and disrepair in urban settings. Ephemeral brush piles, standing and fallen dead wood, piles of leaf litter, brambles, all provide crucial natural habitat to wildlife residents in urban areas – so often, there is a great deal of diversity to be found in the neglect. I noticed this in Brooklyn cemetery – I saw the burning blue flash of bright male bluebirds more than a couple times during my first visit. On my second visit, to confirm burial locations of our respective assigned family members, I brought my binoculars and paid a bit more attention. A host of charismatic bird species were present on this tiny, quiet wooded plot that Brooklyn cemetery rested in – woodpeckers and brown-headed nuthatches abounded in dense numbers! Even a Cooper’s hawk, a less common species than other urban hawks, alighted on a bent sapling directly above one of our family member’s headstones. Even in a place centered around the deceased, I saw the wildlife as a pleasant representation of continued life in wake of loss, propped up by the encroaching wild growth stemming from neglect. But I wasn’t here just to bird.

Over the course of the spring semester, I’ve taken part in Community GIS, a University of Georgia course dedicated to a unique research-learning environment where community members have an equivalent stake to academics in the process and outcome of a research project at UGA. This spring, we’ve been working with members of the Black community in Athens with ties to Brooklyn Cemetery, a historic black cemetery in Athens which has persisted through community ties despite heavy divestment, with no assistance provided by the city to maintain the grounds. The cemetery has been in use since the mid-1800s and hold the ancestral roots of living Black Athens residents. Many buried individuals are unmarked, unidentified, or have gravestones which have eroded and become unrecognizable over time.

After our first tour of the site as a class, we discussed the densely wooded nature of the cemetery, and it was very noticeable how different everyone felt. Some garnered a sense of peace and privacy emanating from the tall loblolly pines. Others correctly identified a material burden - leaves obscure footpaths, branches fall on graves, uprooted storm-felled trees laying across gravesites for weeks. The diversity of reaction reminded me how radically views on the purpose and function of a space can differ, even within our class group. To me, the kneejerk anticipation induced by the disrepair (there could be just about any species gleaning a bug out of that twig pile!) indicated my distant position to those closest to Brooklyn cemetery – when I looked there, I saw the birds first, and the gravesites second. Looking from a different perspective, one notices that the overgrown nature of the cemetery makes the maintenance of the space more difficult with few hands and little funding. 

This internal tension I experienced mirrors some others seen in conservation and environmentalism. Broadly, efforts to create, maintain, and protect natural spaces can come at the cost of resource access, cultural practices, or the autonomy of vulnerable communities. More specifically, seeing beauty in nature’s reclamation of human-altered spaces may be a common impulse for those ecologically-minded —but without nuance it risks overlooking the material reality of extant vulnerable communities. Witnessing the rewilding of Brooklyn Cemetery should be read in light of what is being abandoned and why.

In class, we read Katherine McKittrick’s Plantation Futures which details how the structure of the plantation—hierarchies of race, labor, land control, and extraction—are not relics of the past, but persist in present-day landscapes and institutions. These logics structure the uneven distribution of resources, care, and visibility into the modern day. In the case of Brooklyn Cemetery, it is apparent how this plantation hierarchy persists through systematic divestment, allowing a Black cemetery to fall into disrepair due to this inequitable distribution of resources. 

In addition to the weathering of Brooklyn Cemetery by nature, there also is no existing, navigable and easily accessible public record of individuals buried there currently available. As a class, through communication with our mentor Dr. Gerald Shannon and community leader Linda Davis, we have endeavored over the course of the semester to investigate what it would mean to provide a deliverable product to the community that achieves the best interests of those with intimate ties to Brooklyn Cemetery. In doing so, we have spent most of the semester building an accessible online genealogical history of some of the families interred at Brooklyn Cemetery. In doing so, through the theory we’ve read and the tools we put into practice in doing this community engaged research, I feel more prepared to take on ecological issues that concern human livelihood.

Henry Beckham Climie is a 4th year B.S. student in ecology. He is passionate about human-wildlife interactions, ornithology and birding, and wildlife conservation. In the future he hopes to engage in work directly with wild bird species and with human communities to bring awareness of wildlife issues to the public.

Keywords: Community science, Community GIS, Brooklyn Cemetery, Black cemeteries, Rewilding, Positionality, Ecology, Birding

by Amelia Shugart

Cemeteries can be a place of peace in otherwise bustling spaces. For many, they are a space to connect to loved ones. Others, places for historical exploration and curiosity. Tucked between Clarke Middle School and Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Brooklyn Cemetery has experienced both historic neglect and grassroots revitalization over the past few decades.

What do you think of when you think of a cemetery? When thinking of a cemetery, you may think of an expansive lawn-scape with tightly organized burial plots. You may think of old trees or wind chimes. Brooklyn Cemetery is hidden in a forested space: shaded by large trees, leaves blanketing pathways and graves, and various plants growing wildly among the burial plots. It is one of the first Black cemeteries in Athens, a final resting place for many residents located in the Brooklyn/Hawthorne neighborhood. In the late 1900s and early 2000s, the cemetery was disturbed by surrounding construction projects and housing development. At the same time, it fell into a state of neglect due to funding shortages and government inattention. This neglect is evident in the cemetery: PVC pipes as grave markers, vine overgrowth, and sunken gravesites. In recent years, community members have worked to restore the cemetery and collect information regarding the families buried there. Leading these efforts is Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery, a community organization spearheaded by Ms. Linda Davis. Their work, alongside UGA students and faculty from various disciplines, has helped catalog geographic and historical data to preserve the cemetery’s legacy.

In our Community GIS class, we are working to collect and map genealogical data on families buried there. We are compiling census, city directory, FamilySearch and Ancestry records in order to build a StoryMaps that highlights the history, geography and connections within a family buried in Brooklyn Cemetery. With this information, we hope to be able to tell parts of their stories. GIS tools are essential for representing these families’ stories, but humanizing the data is just as important. Publicly engaged research is complex, because we often have different personal backgrounds that may influence our perceptions and experience throughout the project. As a student of UGA, an institution responsible for injustice toward the Black community in Athens, understanding positionality and UGA’s history is crucial. When we started the project, I wasn’t aware of Black history or geographies in Athens. I felt more neutral. Throughout the process, I’ve found myself becoming progressively more emotionally connected to the project, and taking on more of an activist perspective. This is a new experience, because my previous research experience has been largely quantitative and fundamentally neutral. Being actively engaged in pragmatic and community-focused research has expanded my prior perceptions of what it means to be a researcher, emphasizing the importance of being an active community member and an advocate.

A few weeks ago, our class had the opportunity to speak with Ms. Linda Davis. As she talked about the history of the cemetery, she explained the importance of the trees in preserving the memory and physical life of people buried there. Hearing her experiences was incredibly influential in connecting to the project on a personal level. Walking in Brooklyn Cemetery exemplifies this: the tall tree canopy, birds flittering between branches, and patchy sunlight through the dense leaf coverage. While sifting through records on FamilySearch, I was able to find the marriage certificate of Elsie and Robert Callaway. I wrote down the marriage date, then realized that they were married on Christmas day in 1892. Finding this record was early into researching the Evans/Callaway family. Thinking about the couple being married on Christmas day stirred up slight emotion. Feeling a more personal connection to a research project was new to me. This seemed like a pivotal moment in the process of researching this family’s history, because I had never felt any sort of emotional connection to data I worked with. I was reminded of the responsibility of human-subjects research and our place as researchers in facilitating the storytelling of the Evans/Callaway family.

A theme throughout our class and human-subject research as a whole is the complexity of “hyphen-spaces” in research projects. “Hypen-spaces” refer to the fluid and active identities of researchers conducting human-subject research. Positionality and context are key components of identity within “hyphen-spaces” of research. The complexity of “hyphen-spaces” as fluid relationships between communities and researchers is evident in our research process. As an outsider with no prior knowledge of Brooklyn Cemetery, I didn’t come into the project with much of a connection. Through the process, I’ve learned that being both a researcher and an active community member can sustain relationships and foster pragmatic solutions.

Amelia Shugart is an undergraduate student in Ecology, pursuing certificates in GIS and Sustainability.

Keywords: Hyphen-spaces, Community-engaged research, Collaboration, Research

by Carmel Serban

This semester, I have had the privilege of taking Community GIS, a service learning class at UGA. In such a class, rather than simply being taught concepts and information, students learn through working on real world projects involving engagement and interaction with the local community. In this class, we are working as part of a larger effort to rehabilitate Brooklyn Cemetery, a historic Black cemetery in Athens, and to help make the stories of families buried there more visible and accessible. Through this opportunity, I have not only honed my technical GIS skills and gained experience working as part of a team on a real world project, but broadened my perspective and worldview.

One of the earliest discussions we had in class surrounded the question of what exactly community geography is. As a preview to the discussion, we read the scientific paper “Doing Community Geography” [Fischer et al.], which stated that community geography is a framework and philosophy that “offers researchers, community groups, and students opportunities to engage in action oriented applied geographical research.” To me, that means engaging in projects and research in tandem with the communities of interest in order to address problems and or create solutions within them.
Fitting with this theme, one aspect of my experience in the class that I have enjoyed is putting technical skills I have learned throughout my college career to use in the community. As the name suggests, Community GIS is on some level a GIS related class. GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, is a type of software that allows the user to process and analyze geospatial data, and to create maps. While my previous experience in such classes was heavily based on gaining experience with learning to perform technical operations within the software, here, that has taken a backseat to the more organic, human side of geography.

Another discussion early on in the semester was related to the dichotomy of the cold, black and white nature of GIS software, and the inherently “gray” and complex nature of human issues and stories. In the software, collected data is clear cut and completely unambiguous, but through suites of maps, as well as written and visual aids, we are working to tell as full of stories as possible about these families. As part of this conversation, we discussed the frameworks of positivism and pragmatism. Positivism is a school of thought that arose during the enlightenment, and posits that all human knowledge is absolute, and that everything in the universe, including interactions between members of human societies, can be deduced through logic or mathematical proofs. This procedural view of the universe obviously has its limitations, especially when it comes to humanity, but is essentially how computer programs and code work– including GIS. Conversely, while pragmatism is still analytical and problem solving based, it views reality as somewhat indeterminate and observers never truly unbiased.

While working on the Brooklyn Cemetery project, I became very aware of the fact that I can never truly be a fully unbiased observer. Not only is there a lot that I haven’t experienced, but due to differences in brain chemistry and past experiences, I will not necessarily perceive the same events and ideas in the same way as others. One such situation arose during a discussion at the end of our class’s first tour of the cemetery. An unusual aspect of Brooklyn is that rather than a well manicured lawn like most cemeteries, its grounds are covered by a forest. Some of the class, myself included, thought that this contributed to a natural serene atmosphere, and noted the symbolism of continued life in the area sustained by those buried there. However, others saw them as actively hiding the cemetery, and yet another example of the history of neglect and mistreatment of the Athens Black community. While that is not the way I first perceived the tree cover, I fully understand how others could first interpret it that way– and trees aside, it is a fact that the cemetery has been neglected and is in relative disrepair, although there are ongoing efforts from the community to rehabilitate it. This debate strongly highlighted to me the idea that nobody can be a truly disconnected and unbiased observer, and while I think both opinions are valid, the thoughts of those who are a part of the historic community surrounding the cemetery should carry the most weight in this instance. It is their family and friends who are buried there, and they have past experience as being a part of the Athens Black community shaping their perception and decision making– something that I very much lack.

As a whole, I am very grateful to be a part of this spring’s Community GIS class and for everything I have learned. Not only have I been able to sharpen and expand my technical GIS skillset and gain experience working as a member of a team toward completion of a real world project, but I have also broadened my perspective and altered my way of thinking about the world. At the conclusion of the semester, I will take far more than just a letter grade away from this class– and more than technical and soft skills as well.

Carmel Serban is a 4th year Ecology B.S. and Marine Biology B.S. pursuing a minor in Fisheries & Aquatic Sciences and a certificate in GIS.

Keywords: Histories, Brooklyn Cemetery, Community, Data