March 26, 2008Data Gets Personal: Who lies in Springwood Burial Park?It's called a database, which could hardly sound more indifferent, or more inhuman. But go digging into the database of information on graves in the old and overgrown Springwood Burial Park in Roanoke, once Roanoke's premier, private all-black cemetary, and you'll find way more than hard, unfeeling statistics.  This is lives, stories, deep heartache and grief that speak to you from cells in a spreadsheet. Roberta P. Turner, died in 1938. Her stone reads, "TILL WE MEET AGAIN." Two years later, her daughter Ruth, 17, died, too. Her stone reads, with solemn determination, "I WILL FOLLOW." Levi Barber Jr. lived but 15 years, from August 26, 1923, to a week before Christmas in 1938. The pain his death inflicted is carved right into the stone in the words, "MOTHER'S DARLING." All credit for this fascinating piece of history goes to Robert Bird, the retired Roanoke municpal auditor who with a troop of Boy Scouts has made clearing the graveyard a mission, along with documenting the identities of more than 1,000 people who found their last resting place there between 1937 and 1979. Roanoke Times columnist Shanna Flowers wrote about the effort in a column in Tuesday's paper. So far, Bird has identified the occupants of 289 graves, and catalogued all of the information he's gathered in a meticulous spreadsheet he graciously shared with me so I could put it online for people to search. The first idea was that people who have relatives buried there might learn a little something, or just as good, share some information with Bird. But anybody might find themselves pulled into this history in columns and rows. March 24, 2008Put this in your spread sheet and sort it: I'm famous!So, I’m in the men’s locker room at the Downtown YMCA last week after my workout. In fact, I’m just out of the shower, a towel around me, and just about all of the physical issues I go to the gym to correct on full display. And a guy says to me, “You write for the paper, right?” Not so unusual. I see the guy in there from time to time, though I don’t know his name, and I talk newspaper biz out loud. It's not a big secret where I work. But that’s not what’s triggered this. It’s my face. He just recognized me. He wasn’t quite sure where – was it in the newspaper, or on the web? – but he saw my face and put it all together. Well, this was really satisfying. I follow my blog traffic and traffic on the site. I know how many people check out my work. But this was different than seeing some numbers. This was something altogether separate from data. This was something that eases up to being, for lack of a term that’s not such an overstatement, fame. Continue reading "Put this in your spread sheet and sort it: I'm famous!" » March 21, 2008Green building: What's going on in your town?You hear the buzz more and more lately, including right here where I sit in Roanoke. From the Cradle to Cradle (C2C for short) green building design competition to the debate over building a restaurant atop Mill Mountain, to a recent story by Duncan Adams in The Roanoke Times about the rehabilitation of the State and City Building in downtown Roanoke, people talk more and more about environmentally sustainable building techniques. That means methods, materials and systems that demand fewer resources and creates less waste in the construction, and use energy more efficiently once they're built. The widely-embraced measure for whether you're doing this well is something called the But is anybody around here really doing it? Continue reading "Green building: What's going on in your town?" » March 18, 2008I could have used this when my Dad needed a place to goThat Dad was having a heart attack, well, that was not really a shock. He was 81, and had averaged one every ten years or so since I was in college. The shock was that, even with a pacemaker to keep his ticker ticking, his life as an independent man was over. His health was disintegrating, and the heart attack had triggered a landslide decline in his cognitive ability. He was very suddenly a dementia patient, too. All at once it seemed, he had to leave the VA Medical Center in Salem, but he couldn’t go home. To our great relief, social workers at the VA excel at getting patients like Dad placed in nursing care. Though the first place he landed was a nightmare, and he returned to the hospital within a week, the second time he was released he wound up at the Virginia Veterans Care Center next to the VA. To his family's comfort, that became his home for the rest of his days. Everything worked out as well as it could for Dad, who died in November. But looking back, I wonder, what if we’d had to go into the marketplace for nursing care on our own? I wouldn’t have known where to start except the yellow pages, and they don’t give you much but boasts and phone numbers. I hope you never find yourself in the position my siblings and I were in last year, but if you do, you now have a place to start your search for senior care resources. Continue reading "I could have used this when my Dad needed a place to go" » March 17, 2008Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem crime maps updatedIs thing on? You might have wondered. It's been quiet in the DataBlog lately. But rest assured, your friendly data delivery editor has not abandoned you with your thirst for the maps, graphs, columns and rows. In fact, just this morning, I updated our crime report maps for Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem. That took all of an hour. So where the @#$@! have I been? Working hard for you, gentle reader. For the last several days, I've been chugging along learning some new tricks for delivering data. The Roanoke Times recently signed up for a new service called Caspio Bridge. Without boring you with the technical stuff -- I hope -- I'll just say that Caspio is a kind of online tool box that let's a not-so-geeky, retro-fitted writer like me put databases on the Web. What does this mean for you, you ask? Continue reading "Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem crime maps updated" » |
.....Advertisement.....
|
...Advertisement...
...Advertisement...
