Meghan Delsite
Maps look a whole lot different than they did just fifty years ago. What used to be a badly folded wad of paper in a car’s glove compartment is now an essential app on a cellphone or tablet, a quick reference for someone trying to find the way to an unfamiliar destination. College students no longer need to carry a piece of paper that screams “freshman!” They can just stare at their phones like everyone else, but instead of doing Snapchat they’re trying to find the science building.
Electronic maps have the ability to provide so much more information than just a route or location; they can provide history lessons, which Meghan Delsite ’16 utilized in her junior and senior years at Penn State Altoona. As much to her own surprise as anyone’s, her work creating maps earned her a reputation as “the Mapmaker.” “It started as an accident, a project in Professor Mohammed’s COMM 270 class,” she explains. The class’s final project was to “come up with something multimedia, it had to be new and it had to reach out into the community.”
As a Lion Ambassador and assuredly one of the most active students on campus (featured in the “My Penn State Altoona” column, February 2, 2016), Delsite knew what was going on campus, but she realized that not every student did. So she created a map that allowed users to see what was going on on campus every day. “We started with the campus map from the website. I used Adobe Flash to take a picture and make it ‘dynamic,’ or moveable, so the user could look at Slep, or Miscagnia, or any other building on campus. The user had total control.”
Updates were simple, she explains: “We took an RSS feed from the campus website so that the code updated daily and you could see what was happening on the day-to-day basis.” Delsite was satisfied with the final result. “My main drive was to make something useful. Without the map, if you wanted to know what was going on in a building you had to go to the building director.”
Mohammed was very pleased with Delsite’s work. “When she came up with the first map project none of us was sure how much would be involved,” he says. “We consulted with the IT and Web administrators and found out we would have to interface a web client with a database using an RSS feed and XML coding. I told her it probably wouldn’t be technically feasible but we decided that we would try to make it work. In the end, it was not perfect, but she had a working prototype of an interactive campus map with daily updated events for campus buildings.”
The following semester, another class with Professor Mohammed, COMM 481, but this time the assignment included the entire class and the local community. Tom Shaffer, coordinator for the Center for Community-Based Studies (CCBS), says, “Prof. Mohammad invited CCBS staff (Julie Fether and myself) to talk to his class about possible community-based projects that would tap the knowledge, skills, and perspectives that students had been developing in three-plus years of study in the communications degree program. The class would choose the projects, develop teams, and take full responsibility for a start-to-finish product. ‘Success’ would be measured in part by that product’s potential for use by a community organization.”
Shaffer and Fether had some ideas for the students. “We presented the idea of ‘story maps’ to the class along with various applications they might consider for their project(s). Importantly, the students choose the project area and define the project parameters in Dr. Mohammad’s classes, not the instructor. Meghan’s team identified Canal Basin Park as the focus of their work.”
Delsite, who very easily says, “I love history,” thought the subject was perfect. “The CCBS was working with Pittsburgh-to-Harrisburg Main Line Canal Greenway, the Blair County Historical Society, and the National Park Service to bring awareness about the canal in Hollidaysburg,” she explains. What is now the Canal Basin Park was in the mid-1800s part of the Pennsylvania Canal system’s solution for traversing the Allegheny Ridge. Boats traveling west were taken out at Hollidaysburg and hauled by the Allegheny Portage Railroad to Johnstown, where they were put back in the water. Once the Horseshoe Curve was built, the canal was no longer needed. It was abandoned and filled in by the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1870s. In the early 2000s the site became a local park, with a visitors’ center, playground, performing arts facility, and trails for walking and biking.
To get an idea of what they were undertaking, the class visited the site. The borough, which owns and manages the park, agreed to open up the Visitor Center (Reiser House) for the first time in nearly two years for the visit. Shaffer and Fether also arranged for National Park Service ranger Doug Bosley to provide a guided tour of the park, offering students a deeper understanding of the existing interpretive structures as well as the broader history of the Pennsylvania Canal. Blair County Historical Society executive director Joseph DeFrancesco joined the tour as well.
“Tom and Julie said they would love to have some kind of map that pops up with information,” Delsite says. “It was decided we would do something more basic, with no need for RSS. The user only needed a button. We put the final project together and presented it as a way to integrate the Canal Basin Project with technology.” In addition to showing the buildings and structures, the map includes a brief history lesson connected to each. “It’s short snippets of information. This was a great way to give the condensed history to people who are interested.”
The project that Meghan’s team’s selected for COMM 490 the following fall semester was a natural extension of the Canal Basin project, building on the enthusiasm the rangers at Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site expressed for the students’ work the previous term. Twice each summer rangers from Allegheny Portage offer a Hollidaysburg Heritage Hike, a physically demanding two- to three-hour tour highlighting the interwoven histories of the canal and of the town. The idea of digitizing key parts of the Heritage Hike was a project the rangers—and Delsite’s student team—enthusiastically embraced. “[We] have a very talented three-person team,” Delsite wrote in her project description, “ready to work on [the Hollidaysburg walking tour map]; essentially, we would like to digitally recreate the tour to make it accessible year-round to more people.”
About that time, CCBS learned that Blair County was implementing a PA Department of Health initiative called WalkWorks, a program intended to get people out and walking, and that it was developing routes in Hollidaysburg and in Gaysport. “These plans dovetailed perfectly with the work we were doing with Meghan and the COMM 490 students. We proposed to join forces: the county would plan the route, designed to encourage and provide a structure for walking as a free and accessible pathway to better health,” Shaffer says, “and Meghan’s team would gather, organize, and present historical content for selected sites along the route to enhance the WalkWorks program.” Delsite, with fellow students Jillian Lemme and Nathan Taylor, worked with those sites: “We did the research, wrote the history, and found the historic pictures,” she says. The end result is an interactive map featuring Hollidaysburg “then and now,” with photographs and historical information.
Mohammed was impressed with Delsite’s performance in his classes. “In both cases, the projects were a leap ahead compared to what students in our program were doing,” he says. “She helped to push the envelope. It was not just her dedication and smarts (there were lots of both) but also her vision and imagination that distinguished her.”
According to Shaffer, the Hollidaysburg WalkWorks program rollout date of April 2016 was at least one factor in Meghan’s decision to enhance and upgrade the Hollidaysburg story maps as an independent project during her final semester at Penn State Altoona. “Meghan adopted the project as her own, putting herself into it completely. She consulted with Julie and me several times during the winter, listening to our thoughts and freely stating her own, based in her knowledge of graphic design principles and the technical skills she had developed through her coursework. What struck most, perhaps, was her professionalism in crafting the project as her own product, using available resources but staying true to her vision,” he says.
The ability to connect concepts learned in different classes is a valuable skill, one Delsite is well known for. “At the same time I’m doing this project, I’m taking this class with [Associate Professor of Communications] Kevin Moist,” Delsite says, “where we learned about how the modern age is reliant upon technology. How do we integrate technology in a better way? How do we get students to look at a screen and not let the screen become their entire life? We use the screen to open the horizons and give them new information.” She applied that thinking to her mapmaking. “A map can give them short bursts of information. It’s a really good way to get the best of both worlds. So what was originally just a classroom project became a way for education and technology to meet in the middle.”
Moist has nothing but raves for his former student. “She is always curious. In my COMM 408 class—about media tech and society—we talked about the Internet and the invention of the alphabet. She started thinking about what it must have been like to live before writing down information. She did a research project on oral cultures and preliterate societies. What can we learn from ancient oral cultures about how to have a strong functioning community-based society? Meghan takes a topic that seems so ancient, historical, abstract, and make it absolutely topical according to the latest research in the field. She was reading those books, she was making those connections. Connecting the ice age with the Internet and making it make sense—she is able to see how different material is relevant to one another.”
Those talents paid off. “Meghan was outstanding in her role as team leader role for the course-embedded projects, and displayed a degree of professionalism far exceeding most undergraduates in revising, enhancing and implementing her final semester project,” Shaffer says. “Reflecting the uniqueness and quality of her work, Meghan was awarded First Prize in her category for the Hollidaysburg Historic Walking Tour map revision by faculty judges at the Spring 2016 Penn State Altoona Research and Creative Activities Fair. Her final product continues to be available to WalkWorks participants as well as the general public.”
Having charted out a career path toward college administration, Delsite is now graduated and working on her master’s degree at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. But visitors to Hollidaysburg will be following in her footsteps—or at least the steps she has mapped out—for a long time to come.
Therese Boyd, ’79