Category: Digital Humanities

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Data Digital Humanities General GIS GIS in History Slideshow

Free, GIS-ready historic maps from New York Public Library

Here’s another treasure trove of data that’s ready and waiting to be added to your ArcMap session.

Over the last several years the New York Public Library has scanned more than 10,000 public domain historic maps and atlases of New York City and made digital copies of those maps available via its website. Recently NYPL took this project to the next level by creating a web tool that can be used (by NYPL staff as well as volunteers from the general public) to georeference the maps – i.e. pin the historic maps down to their location on a modern-day reference map.  Click here to check out their blog post about the project. Or click here to check out the do-it-yourself MapWarper tool and/or browse through the thousands of maps that have already been georectified.

What’s the big deal about being able to look at historic maps in GIS? Here’s an excerpt from the NYPL blog post on the project that does a great job of explaining how GIS can shed new light on old maps.

So, what does this all mean? If we have documents related to past times and past places (old maps), then we can create data to “rebuild” those past times and past places. And if we “rebuild” old places in virtual space, we can then organize a universe of other information around those old places. Wouldn’t it be great to haveyelp.com and menupages.com, but for old restaurants and with old menus and prices? Or to have at least a smattering of old photos in a historical street view? Or to search the National Newspaper Digitization Project using a map interface? At the core of all of these dream-like research futures is geographic information, in machine-readable format. And to get there, we need to warp, crop, mosaic, and trace our old maps. That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. And as a positive byproduct, the maps just so happen to become more useful at each step along the way.

Using the NYPL website to find GIS-ready historic maps is incredibly easy. I used the ‘search by map’ option to zoom into Prospect Park in Brooklyn to find georectified historic maps that I could download and add straight to my ArcMap session. A whopping 394 maps were returned in the results – i.e. 394 maps that I could download as a KMZ file and add directly to ArcMap to explore how this small chunk of turf grew, changed and evolved through time to become the place that it is now.

 

If you find maps in the NYPL collection that have the historic places or events that you are interested in, but are not yet GIS-ready, you can use the MapWarper tool to georeference them yourself. Here’s a link to instructions for using the MapWarper – along with a YouTube video that describes the process.

httpv://youtu.be/G8ms_eBU8MQ

 

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Bucknell/Local Interest Digital Humanities General GIS GIS in History Slideshow

Bucknell HGIS presentation at Yale

Over the last two and a half years, Bucknell History professor David Del Testa has been working – on his own and in collaboration with me and the GIS Student Assistants – on integrating GIS into his research on historical protest events in Vietnam.  Last October, Prof. Del Testa presented preliminary results from this work at UC Berkeley’s Center for Southeast Asia Studies. Click here to see a video of his presentation and to check out his H-GIS (historical GIS) blog Places, Spaces, Peoples, History.

On Wednesday, February 8th, Prof. Del Testa will be travelling to New Haven, CT to deliver another presentation of his work in progress. The presentation, called ‘Re-Evaluating Vietnam’s Nghe-Tinh Soviets (1930-31) using a Historical GIS,’ will be hosted by the Yale University Council for Southeast Asian Studies and is open to the public (in case you happen to be in the neighborhood… the talk will be held in Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue).

Here’s a link to the presentation announcement, along with an abstract:

“Reevaluating the Nghe-Tinh Soviets of 1930-1931 using a Historical GIS: Refining Some Preliminary Observations”
David Del Testa, Department of History, Bucknell University

The Nghe-Tinh Soviets of 1930-1931, a rebellion against colonial authority in north-central and central colonial Vietnam, has received extensive analysis by a variety of commentators and scholars, both Vietnamese and not. Most scholars, Vietnam and internationally, settled on some view of immiseration combined with the presence of pro-communist organizers as the motive forces for the rebellion, but a few have favored questions of political dissatisfaction and local empowerment as underlying motivations for revolt. Until recently, examining the rebellion on a gross scale in order to test either theory has proven difficult, with a surfeit of information but no easy way to process it in order to underwrite large-scale analyses. Del Testa is using a historical GIS (geographical information system) analysis, which blends statistics with digitized maps, in order to display correlations between factors, such as wealth, religion, and so on of those who rebelled in order to reexamine the Nghe-Tinh Soviets movement on a grand scale. His presentation will illustrate some initial findings as well as the techniques used.

 

 

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Bucknell/Local Interest Digital Humanities Environment General GIS GIS in Computer Science GIS in Environmental Studies GIS in Geography GIS in Geology GIS in Public Health GIS in Sociology Slideshow

From the Yale Daily News… “Map on, Maples!”

The Yale Daily News has a great article about the role that the GIS Specialist, Stace Maples, plays on campus. Maples, a fellow ESRI T3G Institute alum from summer 2010, works with faculty and students on integrating GIS into teaching and research at Yale and…

… he is in high demand. Working in the three-person Map Department, a department within the Yale University Library, he trains students and faculty in the use of the arcane computer program. He helps professors in areas from history to public health, in such projects as diverse as mapping correspondence networks and placing photographic collections in a geological context. He is adamant that geographical data is relevant to all academic endeavors.

“Everything is somewhere, and that somewhere matters,” Maples declared.

Although I take issue with the reporter’s use of the word ‘arcane’ to describe GIS software, I’ll second Stace’s assessment that location matters (or, as the Geospatial Revolution team at Penn State put it, “the location of anything is becoming everything“).  In a statement that is sure to resonate with faculty, Peter Bol, the director of the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University, is quoted in the article as saying that:

 “If you want to publish competitive research today, you have to have GIS.”

That might be a bit of an overstatement (for the moment, at least), but there’s no doubt that incorporating GIS and spatial analysis is increasingly becoming an expectation in academic research, much in the same way as it has become part of the fabric of our everyday lives.  Dana Tomlin – who is… a visiting faculty member in the Yale School of Forestry, co-director of the Cartographic Modeling Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, a GIS Hall of Fame-r, the creator of map algebra, and, incidentally, the grad school professor who got me hooked on GIS (thanks, Dana!), sums it up this way:

“With the advent of web mapping services like Google Earth and Bing, the ability to sense geographical position in real time via the Global Positioning System (GPS), and the opportunity to place this sort of magic quite literally into the hands of anyone with a smart phone, there is no question that the world at large is already well beyond the point of no return in terms of making routine use of geographical data in digital form.”

GIS has existed as a computing technology since the 1960’s, but until the mid to late 1990’s it was largely the domain of highly-trained specialists working from high-powered servers. GIS software and web-based map apps have become increasingly faster, more powerful and more user-friendly over the last 20 years. If those trends continue, and if we do our jobs well, Stace and I might very well work ourselves out of a job:

It is conceivable that GIS might one day become as ubiquitous within academia as Google Maps is within the broader population. If departments integrate GIS into their own teaching, the role that Maples and other specialists play is likely to diminish. Graduate students in fields employing GIS are expected to understand the program and its functionalities… Meanwhile, academics who only rarely use GIS might consult specialists if and when necessary, while remaining blissfully oblivious of the program’s nitty-gritty.

Today’s graduate students are tomorrow’s professors. And, if the trends hold true, at least a significant proportion of them will soon be using GIS technology to gain deeper insight into diverse fields of study for decades to come. So map on, Maples.

Click here to read the full story and learn more about how Yale faculty and students are using GIS to study history, archaeology, linguistics, environmental studies, forestry, public health and other topics.

 

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Digital Humanities General GIS GIS in History Slideshow

Using G.I.S. to Visualize Historical Landscapes

Guest post by Michael Grasso, Environmental Studes 13′

Geographic Information Systems can be used recreate a landscape that no longer exists. Historians can use this technology to help explain confusing, or even previously unexplainable, events that took place in the past. For example, General Robert E. Lee issued a series of orders (Pickett’s Charge) that directly caused the Confederates to lose the battle of Gettysburg and inevitably the Civil War. If anyone stood today where General Lee stood that fateful day they would be able to clearly see the fortified, superior Union force waiting for the charge – and wonder why Gen. Lee made the decision that he did. However, the landscape has dramatically changed in the 150 years since the Civil War.  Using historical maps and other documentation, geographers and historian were able to re-create the landscape that General Lee saw and to determine that – from his position 150 years ago -one could not see the eastern end of the battle field where Union forces were amassing.

This is a link to an article explaining how G.I.S. was used to answer questions be recreating historical landscapes such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the 1930s dust bowl, and the Salem Witchcraft Trials.

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Bucknell/Local Interest Digital Humanities Environment General GIS GIS in History GIS in Humanities Slideshow

Georeferencing Historic Maps of Susquehanna Valley Region

Guest Post by Robby Holler, Geography/International Relations ’13

During the past two months, I’ve spent time working with other GIS interns with many of their projects.  Much of my time, though, has been spent on two projects: georeferencing an 1868 atlas of central Pennsylvania and georeferencing and vectorizing a map of Lake Otsego.  Both of these projects tie in closely to the Susquehanna River Valley and are part of the Stories of the Susquehanna program.

Most of the GIS student assistants pitched in to help with the 1868 atlas.  Together we georeferenced over 30 maps of central Pennsylvania.  To do this, we scanned pages from the atlas, clipped them to include only the maps, and then used stream, state road, and local road shapefiles to georeference them.  Most roads on the county maps correspond to still existing state roads.  The local presence of this project struck me as I drove down 522 a few days after georeferencing Middleburg, Beaver Springs, and Beavertown.  It was interesting to drive down highways I had mapped and recognize all the local cross streets.

Lake Otsego is located in Otsego County, New York, and is known for three things: Cooperstown (the location of the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, the headwaters ofthe Susquehanna, and the setting for James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, most notably Last of the Mohicans).  It is these last two facts that interest Alf Siewers, Professor of English.  He gave me a pamphlet titled “James Fenimore Cooper’s Otsego County” and asked me to vectorize the two maps on it.  One map focused on Cooperstown and the other on the whole lake.  Both displayed points important to Cooper and his family, or featured in his literature.  I georeferenced the lake image and then recorded all the points on the map by creating a new shapefile.  To vectorize Coopersburg, I didn’t need to georeference the given map.  I just used roads and local landmarks on a basefile to correctly place points in a new shapefile.  I edited the tables for each new shapefile to add information about every point, including names and known literary references from Cooper’s novels.  Finally, I created an exported final maps with BingMap hybrid basefiles, street layers, a transparent rectified original map, and my new shapefiles.