5 Digital Mapping Projects That Visualize History

Forget cartography: Maps also serve humanistic inquiry. When I can't coax students to participate, I'll pull up a map and marvel at their volubility. In fact, I often use Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover, "View of the World from Ninth Avenue," as an on-ramp for a conversation about bias. (PCMag readers might prefer Mad Magazine's Apple Maps version). As savvy consumers—and critics—of imagery, students are well-equipped to interpret maps.

Moreover, if maps are effective pedagogical tools, digital maps are doubly so.

A new academic cohort is integrating computer technology into humanities research and teaching. In this writer's opinion, the emerging field, the Digital Humanities, will challenge how universities think about and evaluate academic scholarship. For this three-part series, I focus on an area in which Digital Humanists serve universities and autodidacts: digital mapping projects. This week, I share some of my favorite digital tools for exploring history.

Before we embark on that journey, allow me to profess my biases. As an educator, I'm interested in tools that serve instruction. Logically, I have selected projects related to my teaching. This doesn't mean there aren't other exemplary projects—I almost included Locating London's Past, for example—but for now I have corralled mapping projects that skew towards American history and literature. (My hope is that readers will share other resources via the Comments thread). Finally, as an advocate for open access, I have prioritized open-source projects. All these tools are free for educational use, and many include archival holdings and contextual materials.

Hypercities
A project out of UCLA, Hypercities is continually replenished by contributions from researchers around the world. As their website puts it, "Hypercities are always under construction." Visitors can browse topical projects, ranging from data visualizations of Twitter streams from the Tehranian election protests to photo maps of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, or browse historical maps for more than two dozen cities.

The latter is particularly useful because its basis, Google Earth, is familiar to most students. With locations as diverse as Dallas-Fort Worth and Soweto-Johannesburg, learners can summon a city over which to layer geo-rectified maps. New York, for example, has 39 maps, beginning with a digital recreation of Manhattan prior to European colonization ("1609 Mannahatta"), running through the colonial era, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to a contemporaneous subway map ("2006 Brooklyn Subway"). With the ability to control the opacity of layers, learners can overlay maps to see how urban landscapes change over time.

Geography of the Post
Stanford's Spatial History Project is a treasure trove of digital mapping projects and scholarship. I've chosen one project, Geography of the Post, that I find utterly engrossing because it uses the quotidian, the USPS, to explore the abstract: the influence and expanse of the federal government; the relationship of public to private space; and the emergence of a national information system.

Given that this project tracks postal activity west of the hundredth meridian (Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas), visualizations are particularly useful for studies of the American West. Students can filter information based upon the status of office (established or closed) or set timeframes through which to study particular events. For example, in a recent course on the American frontier, I could have used post office data to reveal the migration patterns of settlers during the California Gold Rush. I didn't think of it then, but I wish I had.

Visualizing Emancipation
This project out of the University of Richmond aggregates and visualizes various information related to slavery during the American Civil War: its legality according to the U.S. government, movements of U.S. Army regiments, and documentation of the institution's destruction. Learners can view maps based upon particular options (e.g. Union Army Location) or filter by a source (personal papers) or event (African Americans helping the Union).

Even if an educator were teaching a text such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, which precedes the war, she could use Visualizing Emancipation to show where incidents of runaway slaves were recorded in official records, newspapers, and personal papers; in fact, the discrepancy between forms of record could open a conversation about the fidelity of records.

Visualizing Emancipation is also well-suited to high school instruction. In addition to a play button (events play out like a movie), educators can use lesson plans keyed to both the Common Core Standards and Virginia Standards of Learning. Finally, for those interested in civics, Richmond offers another project, Voting America, that visualizes individual, presidential, and congressional elections between 1840-2008.

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The Spread of American Slavery
Developed by a faculty member at George Mason University, Spread of Slavery is a superb complement to Visualizing Emancipation. Where one shows the systematic elimination of slavery during the war, the other underscores its steady growth between 1790-1860. Like Hypercities, Spread of American Slavery is intuitive to use. Learners can adjust the timeframe and toggle between views of census data (e.g. the enslaved and free populations) to visualize slavery's prevalence.

My favorite feature is that learners can cursor over particular counties for granular census data. For example, reading The Garies and Their Friends, I used the tool to learn more about the free African American population in Philadelphia. More generally, however, I can see how this tool could help educators dispel the myth that slavery was ebbing before the outbreak of the American Civil War.

OldNYC
In a previous column, I wrote about how the NY Public Library crowdsourced innovations via projects such as the Map Warper. While there are many reasons to use—and contribute to—Map Warper, I want to highlight a simpler tool that will surprise and delight New York City residents and visitors. Modeled on OldSF, which maps photographs from the SFPL, OldNYC draws from NYPL's 80,000 original photographs, many of which are more than a century old. What I love about this project is that it drives interest in both library holdings and urban surroundings. For example, a block away from PC Labs, I discovered the home where Chester A. Arthur died.

Lest I conclude with a project that evinces a New York bias, I supply one bonus project. Developed by Marshall University and Strictly Business, Clio enables learners to locate nearby historical sites, monuments, landmarks, and museums. In addition to a traditional web interface, Clio offers mobile apps (iOS and Android) that reveal sites based upon location. While I used Clio to locate a 69th Regiment Armory near PC Labs, rest assured that it will conjure cultural sites throughout the United States.

Please join me next week when I consider how digital mapping projects can serve the study of literature.