English’s George Blake, a researcher on urban life and journalism, was recently named as one of six 2023-24 Freedman Faculty Fellows for his work, supporting the advancement of digital scholarship research projects. 

Blake currently investigates Cleveland’s history of lead poisoning and how the media has covered it since the beginning of the 20th century. He’s focusing on what recent technology brings in terms of exploring the use of digital archives, new ways of parsing data and the different approaches to mapping the dangers of lead. 

Blake shared with us his inspirations and goals for the research as well as insights of its persisting relevance.

As a researcher of urban life, how did the topic of Cleveland’s journalism on lead poisoning come to your attention? 

Lead poisoning is a contemporary issue, especially as a health risk to children in lower income urban areas. As I became familiar with the persistence of lead as a problem in Cleveland, I wanted to understand why it would emerge in the news as a pressing issue, then disappear, only to be “discovered” again later.

Two extremely influential pieces that my project inflects include Ivory Perry and the Culture of Struggle and Brush With Death. The former is written by my mentor, George Lipsitz, which covers Perry’s lead poisoning activism in the 1970s, and the latter is by Christian Warren which provides an indispensable history of lead poisoning.

My most recent motivation is The Toxic Neglect series by Rachel Dissell and Brie Zeltner, who have had a large impact within the last decade on this topic. In 2015, they wrote about how Louis Stokes called out journalism’s failures when George H.W. Bush’s dog’s experience with lead poisoning gained significantly more media attention than children who had been harmed.

What are some of the different methods of technological lead mapping, and how do they connect to local law?

Some methods I am analyzing include geographical mapping based on data from childhood blood lead tests and using crowd-sourcing to indicate the location of lead hazards in soil, paint and various post-industrial sites.

Additionally, CWRU uses a digital interface to explain and monitor how landlords are responding to Cleveland’s lead ordinance. This interface integrates data regarding blood lead testing data in different Cleveland neighborhoods, with a number of other data sets, such as housing market patterns. 

The City of Cleveland has agreed to make its progress accessible to the public through the university’s digital dashboard, providing valuable transparency to empower people to hold lawmakers accountable. 

How will the Freedman Fellowship enhance your research methods and efforts?

I will collaborate with the digital scholarship team which will expand my resources to continue working on our interface. We use various software tools to create new ways of conveying this topic to others through visualizing interactive timelines of data, as well as analyzing chasms between different discourse communities. Additionally, I’ve begun conversations about translating this information into an online game that will spread the understanding of the lead problem in Northeast Ohio.

What is the ultimate benefit that your work brings?

While it’s ideal that these new technologies are making the problem of lead poisoning go away, it’s most likely that the “best” map is less important for resolution than how new tools contribute to creating functional systems. I intend to continue tracking the different approaches to mapping that emerge across the country, while orienting this around the relationship between journalism, digital media and making systems work.

We are in the age of information overload and an intense news cycle. Lead occasionally appears in this, but it’s an issue that has existed for a long time. Our research examines whether the story has changed, whether new data technologies help tell the story better, or if this is simply a story that will continue to repeat itself. Perhaps the new tools will help frame the question in a way that will allow for a genuine difference in lead poisoning’s tracking and prevention.

George Blake was also previously a lecturer in the Department of Music and a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Baker Nord Center for the Humanities. Learn more about his work.