5 April: Visualizations, Mapping & Spatial History

Before class:

Take a look at Google Maps Engine Lite and the support documents.
Take a look at StoryMap
Read: Stephen Robertson, “Putting Harlem on the Map”
Stephen Robertson, “Traffic Accidents in 1920s Harlem”
Explore (pick 1):
- Digital Harlem: Everyday Life, 1915-1930
- Railroads and the Making of Modern America
- Visualizing Emancipation
- Animal City
- Urban Experience Chicago: Hull House and Its Neighborhoods
- “Mapping Poverty in America,” New York Times
- “The Most Detailed Maps You’ll See from the Midterm Elections,” New York Times
- Tweets near “George Mason, VA”
- Flowing Data: Coffee, Pizza, Burgers
- “Killings by Law Enforcement, San Francisco,” Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
- Examples of historians’ maps
  - History Pin: “The March on Washington”
  - History Pin: “Witness the past in modern-day Washington, DC, the Penn Quarter Neighborhood”
  - Histories of the National Mall (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media)
  - Visualizing Emancipation (Digital Scholarship Lab)
- Read: White, Richard. “What Is Spatial History?”
- John Theibault, “Visualizations and Historical Arguments,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, edited by Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty (University of Michigan Press, 2013).
- Sign up for an account at the David Rumsey map Collection. Pick at least one map of your city from the topic’s time period. Read the introduction to Georeferencing.
- Sign up for a free account at CartoDB and look through the introduction.
- Take the book you read about your topic or any other source that you have found. Compile a list of at least five specific places in a spreadsheet. You should record the following kinds of information, each in a separate column: address, city, state, date, description, people or groups involved, page number, source. We will use this data in class.

During class:

Test Google Map Engine Lite, StoryMap, and ViewShare
- uk-global-fat-supply-1894-1896-sheet1-csv
Produce a map with at least 5 points of interest related to your research topic/question.
- Option 1: Pick a map (or several) of a city within your research in the David Rumsey Map Collection or other Historical Map site and georectify it. I will use MapWarper in class.
- Begin by going to the Map Warper website and creating an account, then login.
- Embed that map in your WordPress blog.
Carto
- ballard_churches
- grocery
- dataset_for_data_maps
- Embed that map in your WordPress blog.
StoryMap exercises to arrange our data on a map
- Data: http://bit.ly/1dXoTAg
- Embed that map in your WordPress blog.
Potential Maps to explore:

After class:

In your blog post this week, Embed each map we experimented with. Please discuss the map that you feel best represents your research–what you chose to map, why you chose it, your process for creating your map, and any observations or analysis about your habits that your map helps you to understand. For example, if all your favorite haunts are in one neighborhood, what might that tell you about where you spend your time? You have 300 words, so please think about it. If you find you have trouble with this assignment, you may also blog about what you tried and where you got stuck.

Sample data sets

Locations in Amsterdam depicted in art between 1550 and 1750. Source: Matthew Lincoln. ‘Middlebury_amsterdam: Data for 2014 Kress Digital Mapping and Art History Summer Institute.’ Zenodo, 2015. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.15461. GitHub.

Abby Mullen, Quasi-War Encounters. See related map of this data.

Natural Earth: cultural and physical data. Download Quick Start Kit.

Catholic dioceses in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Data compiled from Joseph Bernard Code, Dictionary of the American Hierarchy (1789-1964) (New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1964), 425-26, and for the United States since 1963, Canada, and Mexico from http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/.

U.S. Cities and Populations. U.S. Census Bureau and Erik Steiner, Spatial History Project, Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University.

Will Thomas, et al., Railroads and the Making of Modern America (University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2011). Historical railroad information for the United States in a variety of formats.

John H. Long, et al., Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture, The Newberry Library, Chicago (2010).

Jason Heppler, “Machines in the Valley” (2015).

Art auction data. Compiled by Spencer Roberts.

Tate Collection. Artist and artwork data sets. I have geocoded the artists.

National Historic GIS. U.S. Census data available via the NHGIS data finder. Or, download a set of data from the 1890 census with accompanying shapefiles. All the NHGIS state and county shapefiles simplified and reprojected. NHGIS data for Day 2

Occupy directory.

Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations.

The Atlantic Netowrks Projects.

Historic England data sets. © Historic England 2015. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2015 The Historic England GIS Data contained in this material was obtained in May 2015. The most publicly available up to date Historic England GIS Data can be obtained from http://www.HistoricEngland.org.uk.

Gapminder. World demographic and health data. Gapminder food and Gapminder GDP.

Pleiades. Ancient place names and locations.

Her Hat Was in the Ring. Not spatial but could be. Some transcribed data from the workshop.

A New Nation Votes.

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. An export from that database.

China Dimensions data collection.