In this blog, RomMig Co-Lead Tamara West introduces the interactive 1906 ‘StoryMap’
One of the key events informing the RomMig project is the 1906 migration of two hundred German Roma and Sinti to the UK. Entering ports in Scotland and England on steamships arriving from Hamburg, the visitors caused a political and public stir. During their 8 months stay they formed smaller groups and undertook several concurrent sub-journeys. Some followed the horse fair calendar with the aim of trading horses. Others undertook song and dance performances at local theatres. The event was referred to in the press and in public debate as the ‘German Gipsy Invasion‘.
Understanding the Journey(s)
In some ways, creating a map detailing external coverage of the 1906 Germany-UK migration was simple. There were so many UK newspaper articles, UK Home Office files, local and regional police reports, and postcards of the event that sources were not a problem. The scale of the media spectacle meant that almost every day one or more newspapers reported – often using discriminatory and racialised language – on the whereabouts of the 1906 visitors.
Understanding the routes taken turned out to be more difficult. By visually mapping a selection of the newspaper articles in ArcGIS it became clear that there were concurrent ‘mini-journeys’. The resulting ArcGIS StoryMap highlights how groups could be at different locations at the same time. Sometimes these mini-journeys could be isolated and followed, but more often than not they couldn’t.
Creating the Maps
The first stage was to create a basic static map, populated with a chronological spreadsheet of UK newspaper articles. For this, over 300 press reports were manually filtered according to content, with duplicate stories, very short reports, or those not specifically mentioning a geographical location removed. As such, of the several hundred reports, only 73 articles were selected for use in the initial static map to visualise the journey. Here each dot represents a newspaper article that ties the visitors to a specific place on a specific date.
The next step towards the interactive StoryMap was to target specific dates and places and publications, this time informed by the complimentary archival research undertaken. For example, if a police record mentioned activities at a certain place, or a postcard was from a certain town or village, then the corresponding local newspapers on that date were cross referenced. Finally, twenty-two items were selected to form the basis of an interactive, chronological map that could present an overview of the 1906 ‘invasion’ via newspapers, photographs and reports.
A Starting Point
The StoryMap available here is to be viewed only as a starting point. It is a means of visualising a selection of the external coverage of the event via archival and media research. This is presented in order to stimulate further discussions with communities who might question the external narratives and coverage, highlight gaps, contribute stories or community perspectives to follow up on, make new maps, or develop the research themselves in different ways. Whilst it signifies the end of my part of the RomMig mapping work, a German language version will be discussed by the other members of the RomMig team at our community partner hosted workshop in Germany in September. They will report on the next steps. All of the maps I created will be uploaded to this website shortly, alongside a more in depth discussion of the methods and sources to follow in our project publications.