Post #1
Digital Curation Archive 

In addition to developing your # of archived items and writing 2-3 sentences about how each might contribute to your final DCP, today you will add to the start of this post three things: 1) your reflection/point, 2) your call to action, and 3) your specific, chosen audience (say who needs to be convinced of your point and why?); 

I plan to use pictures I have taken on the streets of Downtown Morgantown to introduce the problem of the dirtiness of the sidewalks in our city, especially on High Street and around areas where vagrants congregate. I also want to show the problems of the overall aesthetics of having vagrants themselves on the streets. Then I want to explore various solutions to these problems. There are some methods that have already been tried to some extent, but through pictures and links to articles I hope to show the ineffectiveness of these methods, and to offer solutions that could be effective.

A city needs to be clean to be inviting. The residents and visitors need to gain a positive impression of the city from the moment they enter. Businesses need to appear welcoming, and this starts at their entrance from the sidewalk. Businesses suffer if their entrances are stained and dirty, and if they are flanked by dirty appearing people that may intimidate a prospective customer from entering. While flower baskets are a plus to the city, real beauty starts with cleanliness. 

I intend to use this material to convince the citizens and residents of Morgantown to acknowledge that there is a problem. Their lives outside their homes may be led only in cars and places of business and the shopping centers. They may not go downtown, or they may only drive to downtown. In that case they may be unaware of what it is like to walk into and through our town.

Next, I would want the City Council members and the necessary commissions to review my proposals. Actions and funding would have to be agreed on in order to be implemented. Overall, the goal is to achieve positive public opinion and local government backing for the needed changes and the funding that these changes would require.

I


Entry Point: I will begin with a series of pictures of  stains and trash on the streets. I have lots of these and take more whenever I see them, which unfortunately is all the time. This is my favorite picture, of birds eating vomit on High Street.  This picture contrasts the usual Classically Conditioned expectation of seeing birds at a feeder in someone's flower-filled backyard. We don't know whether to feel pity for the birds or to applaud their versatility. At least they are offering some solution to the problem. This will cause Cognitive Dissonance in the viewer, something is just not right about this picture: On several levels.

The next issue is vagrants on the sidewalks. There may be enough of them to physically block your passage on the sidewalk in places. They are unpleasant to walk by as they stare at you and sometimes ask for money. 

They create dirt around the areas where they congregate and  stand or sit.

Some methods have been tried to help address these problems. Some areas have human deflectors added to ledges or walls where vagrants are prone to sit. Cognitive Dissonance at its finest, since this picture was taken outside a church. 

Many websites exist describing similar vagrant problems and how cities have dealt with them. There appears to be no one solution. There is a general feeling in such articles that devices used to dissuade human sitting or laying are unkind and send the wrong message. One such article is here

Morgantown at one time had this set of parking meters and sign in front of the Public Library on Spruce Street. They sought to encourage the public not to enable the panhandlers. These meters are no longer there. Perhaps someone thought they lent a less than benevolent message, like human deflectors. Again, Cognitive Dissonance.

The City does do something to help keep the sidewalks clean. They employ Casey. Casey is basically a One Man Show. For 10 years now Casey has been the sole sidewalk cleaner on the day shift. He did say that there are a couple others that do some cleaning from 4 am to 8 am. Here is a picture of Casey with his cleaning equipment:

Casey is great for trash pickup, but the sidewalks need to be thoroughly cleaned. This requires professional concrete pressure cleaning. This could be done in certain areas like High Street on at least a monthly basis, and less frequently in other selected areas. Watch this video to see such cleaning in action:

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The vagrant problem is more complex. It would be a great solution if the City's vagrants could be turned from a liability into an asset, if they could be employed to clean the sidewalks. Then they could earn money and would not have to panhandle, and would police each other if they were responsible for keeping a certain area clean. Casey says he might be willing to supervise them.

Social services for the "homeless" could be moved away from the Downtown area, perhaps to Westover. They are going to move the bus terminal to Westover, so why not the soup kitchens and shelters, too?  However, this could just cause the same  problems in Westover, so the overall issue has to be addressed. It will take some thinking to come up with solutions to the problem.