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Tracks/Traces: The New Deal Transformation Of Lexington, Kentucky’S Landscapes Of Horseracing And Housing, Piotr Wojcik

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Lexington, Kentucky is a key node in the global thoroughbred horse industry. This archival research examines the transformation of its horseracing and housing geographies during the 1930s by comparing the redevelopment of an old urban racetrack into federal public housing with the simultaneous development of a new racing plant in the nearby countryside. It analyzes the social and economic relations underlying this shift in addition to how these relations were naturalized by the new landscapes they created. Results suggest that a local growth coalition was seeking to emerge from a financial crisis through a spatial fix that capitalized on cultural …

Rediscovery Of A Native American Cultural Landscape: The Chickasaw Homeland At Removal, Michael D. Walls

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Little information beyond generalities exists regarding the cultural landscape of the Chickasaw Indians in their ancestral homelands prior to Removal in the late 1830s. This dissertation evaluates one possible archival source for specifics of Chickasaw land use, the field notes and survey plats compiled as part of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). The process of original survey following land cession treaty divided the ceded area up into the familiar square-mile rectangular system of townships and ranges that extends from the Mississippi Territory westwards, in the so-called public land states.

The research compiles all cultural observations made by the surveyors …

Locative Media, Augmented Realities And The Ordinary American Landscape, Andrew Boulton

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation investigates the role of annotative locative media in mediating experiences of place. The overarching impetus motivating this research is the need to bring to bear the theoretical and substantive concerns of cultural landscape studies on the development of a methodological framework for interrogating the ways in which annotative locative media reconfigure experiences of urban landscapes. I take as my empirical cases i) Google Maps with its associated Street View and locational placemark interface, and ii) Layar, an augmented reality platform combining digital mapping and real-time locational augmentation. In the spirit of landscape studies’ longstanding and renewed interest in …