Christy Hyman is a fifth year PhD student focusing on historical geography at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Her research focuses on African American efforts toward cultural and political assertion in the Great Dismal Swamp region during the antebellum era as well as the attendant political, social and environmental costs of human/landscape resource exploitation. Hyman uses GIS and other digital tools to observe to what extent computational methods in GIS and visualization can inform us of human experiences while pointing out the processes deriving from past oppressive systems in society threatening human potential.