Category: GIS in History

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

PhillyHistory + augmented reality as a smartphone app

This is the first in a series of posts about several exciting new projects that my old friends and Philly GIS happy hour buddies are up to at Azavea.  The first is funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant that was awarded to the Philadelphia Department of Records to create a smartphone app that will enable users to view historic photos from PhillyHistory.org draped over the current modern-day landscape.

If the research proved successful, users would be able to point their smartphones, using the camera view, at a building or other location and see historic images of that same location.  The photos would be accompanied by descriptive information from PhillyHistory.org with additional explanatory text provided by local historians.  This combination of technology and history could be a powerful tool for showing the lengthy and interesting history of Philadelphia.

Click here to read more about the project.  Azavea expects to make the app (for iPhones and phones running Android) available as a free download sometime in the next few months.  A white paper about the project will also be released this spring and could hopefully serve as both inspiration and a springboard for faculty and/or student projects at Bucknell (where we have a wealth of historical images and GIS data for Lewisburg). Click here to read a blog post from Azavea Atlas about other examples of the use of augmented reality in cultural institutions.

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Bucknell/Local Interest Crisis-Mapping Digital Humanities General GIS GIS in Environmental Studies GIS in Geography GIS in History GIS in Humanities GIS in Political Science GIS in Public Health GIS in Sociology Map Apps Slideshow

How big is it really?

Back in December I posted about an NPR story about map scale.  I got so excited about the baseball on the moon map that I neglected to point out the other really interesting link from the story – to the BBC Dimensions website.  Dimensions (or, ‘howbigisitreally’) has a tool that lets you plug in any zip code or location and then choose from a list of events, places or things that you want to superimpose onto your area. See below for a map showing the area that the Guantanamo Bay Naval base would occupy if it was located in Lewisburg. I’ve also included maps showing what the ancient walls of Athens and the Gulf oil spill would look like if superimposed over the Lewisburg area. The Dimensions website has numerous places, events and things to choose from in making your map, including: the war on terror, ancient worlds, the industrial age, space, environmental disasters, depths, cities in history and more.

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

Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty

There are a million reasons I can think of for wanting to be in Santa Barbara, CA this week but one of them is that I’d love to attend UC Santa Barbara’s ‘Think Spatial’ forum. This week’s presentation features Ruth Mostern from UC Merced discussing her use of Google Earth for teaching undergraduate history courses. In Mostern’s upper division history course about the Silk Road, students read travel narratives and then use Google Earth to create digital atlases about their travelers’ journeys.  Here’s a short video that showcases some of her students’ work:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7I2BJBrLAU

Mostern also makes extensive use of GIS in her research and is co-author of the Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty. The website includes maps and downloadable data for counties and prefectures of the Song Dynasty. A sample map from the gazetteer is shown below.

“This map depicts the ratio of cantons to counties based on the data in the Song history. There is no county-level population data for the Song. The number of cantons in a county is the best proxy for its population. Red areas have a large number of cantons, and blue areas have a small number.”

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

Ask the expert: Katie Faull on maps, Moravian diaries and Native American history

In the BU homepage’s February ‘Ask the Expert’ interview, Prof. Katie Faull discusses her research on the 18th Century Moravian settlers and Native Americans who inhabited the Susquehanna watershed region. With the help of her research assistant, Emily Bitely ’11, Prof. Faull has made extensive use of GIS in reconstructing 18th Century landscapes of the Susquehanna.  Read the interview here.

Sample map constructed from witness tree markers and georeferenced historic maps:

Sample map showing locations of Native American sites, trails and sacred places in relation to Marcellus Shale gas drilling.