Exploring local history with the Petrodelphia digital resource

For the last several years, members of the Research Data and Digital Scholarship team have partnered with environmental history researcher and Penn faculty member Jared Farmer to produce the Petrodelphia: America’s First Petrochemical Corridor project, a website that examines Philadelphia’s deep history with fossil fuels, industrial refining, environmental history, the history of science, and the petrochemical industry. Beyond being an interesting way to engage historical research methods and digital scholarship technologies, this project showcases how a scholarly tool can be crafted for a varied group of public and scholarly audiences with an array of intersecting interests. As a public-facing tool as much as one intended for scholars, this resource blurs the boundary between scholarly publication, informational website, and local history showcase. This project has been a illuminating test of RDDS’s ability to serve a variety of stakeholders all while exploring new tools, technologies, and techniques, and it’s exciting to finally be able to share the fruits of this collaboration with the public.

The project, now live at petrodelphia.org, uses an open source digital exhibit tool called “Collection Builder” to gather and present materials compiled from historical archives, industry and governmental reports, environmental groups, and more. These sources, vetted and compiled by Dr. Farmer and his research assistants over several years, shed light on the growth of the powerful petrochemical industry in the lower Schuylkill River watershed and southern and southwestern Philadelphia areas. Alongside the individual sources—over 600 provided in full for users to browse—are a pair of interactive maps that allow users to visualize the developing geographical footprint of the industry as it surges across the landscape from the 1860s through today, and to grapple with the environmental and human costs this expansion has incurred through a map of industrial explosions and accidents.

The chronological scope of the resources included in this project provide an interesting lens through which to trace historical developments of not only the city of Philadelphia, but a wide variety of other topics as well. The birth of photography as a documentary source can be witnessed as views and diagrams of the emerging chemical tank farms and refinery complexes transition from hand-drawn plans and dioramas to photographs beginning in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, diverting along the way into peculiar technologies such as the stereograph (an early pseudo-3D imaging medium popular in the late nineteenth century). This all alongside the more straightforward adoption of aerial photography after World War I for landscape documentation and cartographic purposes. Trends in journalism and reporting are witnessed in the rhetoric and scope of reporting throughout newspaper articles detailing accidents and notable expansions in the development of the complexes throughout the turn of the century. Closer to the present, environmental remediation plans, urban design briefs, and impact studies show the tolls further development of the industry has on the land- and waterways of the region.

Users of the site are invited to browse and explore the varied sources by interacting with the collection and maps, become more deeply informed by the project glossary, engage with analytical scholarly resources provided in the reference library, and dive deeper into sources found in the bibliography.

Additional resources are planned soon, including lesson plans for k-12 educators hoping to engage with local history or other related topics, and increasingly interactive elements on the maps and collection viewer. We hope audiences will continue to engage with this resource as it expands through the years.