DH GIS Projects

Being a list of Digital Humanities GIS (Geographical Information Systems) projects. See this post and this one for background. Not included here are projects directed at digitizing old maps; valuable though that is, what I list here are investigations. It is far from complete; I will be adding to it for the next few months, and then hopefully it will be replaced by a crowd-sourced version.

Addressing History

Scottish Post Office directories and contemporary maps. The execution of this project is excellent. http://addressinghistory.edina.ac.uk/

AfricaMap

Part of the Harvard World Map project. http://africamap.harvard.edu/

A Long History of a Short Block

A study of 486 feet of present-day Greene Street between Houston and Prince Streets in Manhattan, New York. A remarkable and innovative project, producing a kind of thick description of a small area. http://www.greenestreet.nyc

al-Ṯurayyā Project

Mapping the Arabic world in the classical epoque (circa 9th and 10th centuries A.D.). https://althurayya.github.io/#home

Animated Atlas of African History

Flash-based map of Africa, available on the web as downloadable executables for Mac and Windows. http://www.brown.edu/Research/AAAH/index.htm

Amsterdam Time Machine

“A hub for linked historical data on Amsterdam”, which underplays just how useful this site is. Historic map tiles available, which is a rare thing. https://amsterdamtimemachine.nl/

Army Barracks of c18th Ireland

A pilot for the project ‘Mapping State and Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, this site maps all of the army barracks active between 1690 and 1815. http://barracks18c.ucd.ie/

Artists in Paris

Full site now launched: Mapping artists and their neighbourhoods in 17th and 18th century Paris. http://www.artistsinparis.org

Atlantic Networks Project

Maps and data relating to trans-atlantic shipping, including the slave trade. https://sites.google.com/site/atlanticnetworksproject/

Atlas Cartografia Histórica

Mapping the historic local administrations of Portugal, in Portuguese and English. http://atlas.fcsh.unl.pt/cartoweb35/atlas.php?lang=en

Atlas das Paisagens Literárias de Portugal Continental

Atlas of Literary Landscapes of Portugal, in Portuguese but with an english summary. New URL: http://litescape.ielt.fcsh.unl.pt/

Atlas of Early Printing

Printing in Europe, circa 1450 to 1500. http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/

Atlas of Digital Humanities and Social Science / Atlas de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades Digitales

Given the Digital Humanities’ prediliction for talking about itself, it’s suprising that there aren’t more mappings of it. This Atlas, from the University of Granada, covers the social sciences as well as DH, and has a strong Iberio-American focus. In Spanish and English. http://grinugr.org/mapa/ See also this english language presentation of the atlas.

Authorial London

“Compiling and mapping references to places within London found in works by writers who have lived there.” https://authorial.stanford.edu

Batanes Islands Cultural Atlas

A Cultural Atlas that includes maps, a timeline, and images of Batanes, the northern most province of the Philippines. http://ecai.org/batanesatlas/index.html

Beijing in Transition

A Historical GIS Study of Urban Cultures, 1912-1937. In Chinese and English. http://www.iseis.cuhk.edu.hk/history/beijing/index.htm

Beijing of Dreams

Photos of the old walled city of Beijing. http://www.beijingofdreams.com/

Belgisch HISGIS

Geo-historical statistics, 1800-1963/2003. http://www.hisgis.be/

Beyond Steel

Industry and Society in 19th and 20th century LeHigh County, Pennsylvania. http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/beyondsteel/

Bombings of Barcelona

Mapping the air raids upon, and shelters within, Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. In Engloihs, Spanish and Catalan. https://ihr.world/en/projects-bombings-of-barcelona

Bombsight

Bomb Sight is mapping the WW2 bomb census in London using web and mobile mapping technology. http://bombsight.org/

Borderlands Archives Cartography

The geography of nineteenth and mid-twentieth century newspapers from the U.S.-Mexico border. https://www.bacartography.org

Campos de Concentration de Franco

Accompanying the book of the same name, a mapping of Franco’s concentration camps in Spain. En Español. http://www.loscamposdeconcentraciondefranco.es/index.php

Caribbean Cholera Map

Very interesting medical history map and timeline from Duke University’s Haiti Project. http://www.caribbeancholera.org/

Cartographie des Mémoires de l’Esclavage

Mapping memories of slavery in the francophone world. In French. http://www.mmoe.llc.ed.ac.uk/

CHALICE

Under development. Creating a historic placename gazetteer for the U.K. http://chalice.blogs.edina.ac.uk/

Charles Booth Online Archive

Archive of the Victorian social investigator, including his famed poverty maps of London.  http://booth.lse.ac.uk/

China Historical GIS

Covering Chinese history between 221 BCE and 1911 CE. http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/

Chinese Civilization in Time and Space

Ambitious project that appears dormant, without having produced any maps. http://ccts.ascc.net/index.php?lang=en

City Witness

“This project will create an on-line interactive map of Swansea c. 1300, showing its principal topographical and landscape features, alongside an electronic edition of the fourteenth-century witness testimonies describing the hanging in Swansea of the Welshman, William Cragh, by the lord of Gower. This will provide multiple vantage points on the town and the significations attached to locations within the town by different social and ethnic groups (including Anglo-Norman and Welsh, lay and religious, male and female, lord, burgher, outlaw). Website now live: http://www.medievalswansea.ac.uk/

Cleveland Historical

The only mobile phone app produced by academics that I’ve found, now with an improved supporting website. http://clevelandhistorical.org/

Clio

Public history in the United States, delivered by website and mobile app. http://theclio.com/web/

Collective Violence

Mapping Mob Violence, Riots and Pogroms against African American Communities, 1824 to 1974. I worked on this project, finding incidents of racist violence in various digital newspaper archives. https://collectivepunishment.wordpress.com/

Colonial Dispatches

Digitizations of maps, many with added placename information, as part of a large archive on Vancouver Island and British Columbia. http://bcgenesis.uvic.ca/

Colonial Frontier Masacres in Eastern Australia

Important and well-made project mapping colonial violence against indigenous Australians. https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/

Compostela Geoliteraria

Investigating the literature of the city of Santiago de Compostela. In español.
https://www.compostelageoliteraria.org/

Convict Landscapes

https://www.convictlandscapes.com.au/

Locating Australia’s Convicts, 1788-1868, focusing on Port Arthur, Maria Island, Van Diemen’s Land and Norfolk Island.

Cultural Atlas of Australia

“An interactive digital map that explores Australian places and spaces as they are represented in and through films, novels, and plays.” http://australian-cultural-atlas.info/CAA/

Danish Folklore

Bilingual (English / Danish) project mapping Danish folklore and Kristensen’s investigations of it. http://projects.cdh.ucla.edu/danishfolklore/bin/index.html

Danske Herregaarde

Map of Danish Manors, in Danish. http://www.danskeherregaarde.dk/

Decima

“The Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive”, Decima studies Florence under the rule of Duke Cosimo I (1519-1574). http://decima.chass.utoronto.ca/

Dictionary of Sydney

Important and ambitious attempt to annotate Sydney. http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/

Digital Atlas of Indonesian History

Accompanying, and expanding upon, Robert Cribb’s Historical Atlas of Indonesia (NIAS Press, 2000; h-net review), this site requires a serial number from the book for full access. http://www.indonesianhistory.info/

Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization

Comprehensive coverage of early Eurasian civilizations. http://darmc.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k40248&pageid=icb.page188865

Digital Atlas on the History of Europe since 1500

Bilingual (English / German) site, under construction but with many interesting static maps. http://www.atlas-europa.de/

Digital Augustan Rome

Beautiful as well as informative mapping of Ancient Rome. http://digitalaugustanrome.org/

Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty

Very impressive project on the (re)organizations of China during the Song epoch. http://songgis.ucmercedlibrary.info/

Digital Harlem

Very fine website focusing on Afro-Americans in inter-war Harlem, New York. http://digitalharlem.org/ Also blogging at http://digitalharlemblog.wordpress.com/ and see Robertson’s article Putting Harlem on the map.

Digital Harrisburg

Exploring the History, Society, and Culture of Harrisburg, PA, USA. http://digitalharrisburg.com/

Digital Karnak

Interesting site mapping –  in 2 and 3 dimensions – the Temple complex at Karnak, Egypt. http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Karnak/

Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922-1949

Back from the dead: http://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/digital-atlas/

Dislocating Ulysses

Visualizing Joyce’s Dublin text in 3D. http://dislocatingulysses.wordpress.com/

Doha Online Historical Atlas

From UCL Qatar, a map-based history of the city of Doha. http://www.spatialheritage.org/doha/

Driving Through Time

The landscape of the Blue Ridge Parkway, USA, a 469 mile ‘elongated park.’ http://docsouth.unc.edu/blueridgeparkway/

Down Survey of Ireland

Taken in the years 1656-1658, the Down Survey of Ireland is the first ever detailed land survey on a national scale anywhere in the world. The survey sought to measure all the land to be forfeited by the Catholic Irish in order to facilitate its redistribution to Merchant Adventurers and English soldiers. Copies of these maps have survived in dozens of libraries and archives throughout Ireland and Britain, as well as in the National Library of France. This Project has brought together for the first time in over 300 years all the surviving maps, digitised them and made them available as a public online resource. http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/index.html

Edmonton Pipelines

Very interesting collection of projects centered on Edmonton, Canada. http://edmontonpipelines.org/

Execution Sites of Jewish Victims

Mapping the sites of the ‘holocaust by bullets’ in Eastern Europe and Russia, that have been investigated by Yahad-in Nunum. http://www.yahadmap.org/#map/

Exploring the Vilnius Ghetto

reVilna is a digital mapping project dedicated to understanding how the residents of the Ghetto lived, how the ghetto functioned — even, given the circumstances, flourished — how it emerged, and how, ultimately, it was liquidated. Using geographical science and technology, reVilna seeks to reimagine the Vilna Ghetto. http://www.revilna.org/

Falmouth Project

Architecture and history of the town of Falmouth, Jamaica. http://falmouth.lib.virginia.edu/

Frankenstein Atlas

Mapping Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Quite the model example in terms of methodological explanation, supporting documentation and data curation. https://www.jasonmkelly.com/frankensteinatlas

French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe

Excellent site mapping “the trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a celebrated Swiss publishing house that operated between 1769 and 1794.” New URL:
http://fbtee.uws.edu.au/main/

Gathering Places

Religion & Community in Milwaukee. https://liblamp.uwm.edu/omeka/gatheringplaces/

Gazetteer of Sixteenth Century Florence

A database of some 750 items, plotted on the 1584 Buonsignori Map of Florence.http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/florentine_gazetteer/

GeoBib

Geo-referencing ‘early’ (pre-1949) holocaust and concentration camp literature. In German, English and Polish. http://geobib.info/index.php

Geo-Coded Art

Thousands of paintings plotted. See comments for more details. http://www.geocodedart.com/

Geodia

Visualizing the temporal, geographic, and material aspects of ancient Mediterranean civilizations. http://geodia.laits.utexas.edu/

Geography of the Post

Mapping the Post Office in c19th west USA. http://cameronblevins.org/gotp/

German Traces NYC

The German presence in New York City. Available in three different flavours: for mobile phones, as web page and augmented reality application. http://www.germantracesnyc.org/

Geschichtomat

Mapping the Jewish history of Hamburg. In German; a useful resume in English can be found at Google Maps Mania. http://www.geschichtomat.de/

Globalization of the United States

Plotting the global reach of the U.S. from Independence to Civil War, via diplomatic, military, commercial, religious, and other, missions. http://globalization1789-1861.indiana.edu/exhibit/ Now defunct, but archived on the Wayback Machine, and code available on Github.

Going to the Show

Mapping movie-going in North Carolina. http://docsouth.unc.edu/gtts/

Google Ancient Places

Mining Google Books for Geographic data relating to Antiquity. http://googleancientplaces.wordpress.com/

Grub Street Project

Very interesting mapping of early modern London’s literature and publishing using contemporary maps. http://grubstreetproject.net/

Gulag Map

Mapping the Soviet Gulag, and showing the number of prisoners by year. In Russian, but a brief intro can be found at Google Maps Mania. https://gulagmap.ru

Gulag Online

Remarkable multi-disciplinary approach to the Gulag, combining archaeology, biography, history and geography into a map-based site. http://www.gulag.online/?locale=en

Hestia

Mapping the ancient Mediterranean via Herodotus. http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/hestia/

HGIS de la Indias

“Un sistema de información histórico-geográfica para Hispanoamérica, 1701-1808).” Very impressive historical geography of eighteenth century Latin America. In Spanish. https://www.hgis-indias.net/

Hidden Florence

Smartphone app guiding users around early Modern Florence, with some of the material downloadable from the website. http://hiddenflorence.org/

HGIS Germany

Various maps and data relating to Germany. http://www.hgis-germany.de/

Hidden Patterns of the Civil War

A set of interrelated projects on the American Civil War, of which 5 are maps. http://dsl.richmond.edu/civilwar/

HISGIS

Dutch National GIS under development (and in Dutch). http://www.hisgis.nl/hisgis/gewesten/utrecht/atlas_utrecht-1/welkom-op-de-hisgis-site

Historical Town Atlas of the Czech Republic

In English and Czech, maps and terrain of the Czech Republic. http://towns.hiu.cas.cz/intro.htm

Holocaust Geographies

Under development; a blurb can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/project.php?id=1015

Hypercities

“A digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces.” http://hypercities.com

Ieldran

Mapping early Anglo-Saxon cemetaries in England. http://ieldran.matrix.msu.edu

Imagine Rio

“Illustrates the social and urban evolution of Rio de Janeiro over the entire history of the city, as it existed and as it was often imagined.” http://imaginerio.org/

Imago Urbis: Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome

Based on Giambattista Nolli’s important map and Giuseppe Vasi’s comprehensive documentation to portray Rome in the eighteenth century and as part of the Grand Tour. http://vasi.uoregon.edu/index.htm *Dead link.*

Imperiia Project

An ambitious project to map the nineteenth century Tsarist Empire. Also notable for curating and releasing many data sets. http://dighist.fas.harvard.edu/projects/imperiia/

Interactive Nolli Map

Using Nolli’s famous plan to map Rome. https://nolli.stanford.edu/

Irish Famine Project

Mapping population change as an index of the impact of the great Famine.

https://www.irishfamineproject.com

Irish Speakers and the Empire City

Interesting crowd-sourcing project to locate Irish speakers in New York, circa 1910. http://www.nyuirish.net/irishlanguagehistory/

Istanbul Urban Database

Mapping Istanbul with a variety of data including historic maps, aerial photography, transport plans, and social data covering the spaces of everyday life and squatter zones. http://www.istanbulurbandatabase.com/

Japan Historic Agriculture Browsing System

In Japanese, so I’m relying on Google Translate. Historic maps from the early Meiji period, mid to late nineteenth century, geo-corrected. http://habs.dc.affrc.go.jp/index.html

JoyceWays

From Boston College (USA), an iPhone app mapping James Joyce’s work onto Dublin. http://joyceways.com/

Kaart En Huis Brugge

Mapping Brugge / Bruges house by house. In Dutch, but for an English language intro see the talk given by Bram Vannieuwenhuyze  at the IHR Digital History seminar. http://www.kaartenhuisbrugge.be/

Kansas City Literary Map

Marking literary landmarks across Kansas, Texas, USA. http://www.jocolibrary.org/default.aspx?id=3757

Know Your Place

From Bristol Council, a project to map that city’s history, using current and historical maps, and allowing the public to add items. http://www.bristol.gov.uk/page/planning-and-building-regulations/know-your-place

Legacies of British Slave Ownership

Collating and analysing the slave owners paid compensation on the abolition of slavery in 1833. Now with added mappings of Britain, Jamaica, Barbados and Grenada.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

Linguistic Atlas Projects

Studying English dialects in the USA. http://www.lap.uga.edu/

Linguistic geographies: the Gough Map of Great Britain and its Making

Investigating the Gough Map of circa 1360. http://www.goughmap.org/

Literary Atlas of Europe

Revitalised! Very interesting investigations into European literature. http://www.literaturatlas.eu/en/

Locating London’s Past

Just launched, drawing on data from Old Bailey Online and London Lives. Site: http://www.locatinglondon.org Blog: http://locatinglondonspast.wordpress.com/

London Gallery Project

Mapping the art market in nineteenth century London. http://learn.bowdoin.edu/fletcher/london-gallery/ See also Fletcher and Helmreich’s article based upon the project, Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century London’s Art Market

Lost and Found

Mapping the writings and comments of European literary visitors to London. https://www.europeanliterarylondon.org

Lviv Interactive Map

Lviv, in the Ukraine, mapped in various historical dimensions.  http://lvivcenter.org/en/lia/map/

Mao Kun Explorer

Lacks any context, save for a splash screen, but a very fine digital implementation of a Chinese map scroll that goes from China to Iran, through the Indian Ocean. https://zhenghe.rslc.us/

Map of Early Modern London

Based on Agas’ map from circa 1560. http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/ Much updated, with a large gazetteer of early modern London places names: http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/gazetteer.htm

Mapa de la Memoria Histórica de Granada

Mapping the Historical Memory of the Second Republic, the Civil War, and Francoism, in the city of Granada. En español. http://www.mapamemoriagranada.es/

Mapping A Writer’s World

The geographic chronology of Willa Cather. http://cather.unl.edu/geochron/

Mapping American Social Movements

https://depts.washington.edu/moves/

“[M]aps showing the historical geography of dozens of social movements that have influenced American life and politics since the late 19th century.”

Mapping Balzac

Mapping Balzac’s ‘Comedie Humaine’: not only the geography of his series, but the relationships between characters and the events. Old site: http://web.stanford.edu/group/humdesignlit/cgi-bin/mappingbalzac/ New site: http://blogs.memphis.edu/mappingbalzac/

Mapping Black London

Based on the London Metropolitan Archives’ Shifting the Lens database, this maps Black Londoners lives from the mid sixteenth century on. https://mappingblacklondon.org/

Mapping Books

Various experiments in mapping books. http://mappingbooks.blogspot.co.uk/

Mapping Cultural Space Across Eurasia

A collection of projects produced by the Mapping Cultural Space fellowship seminar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. http://eurasia.cga.harvard.edu/

Mapping Cville

A crowd-sourcing project hosted at Zooniverse, plotting those Charlottesville property deeds with racist covenants forbidding sale to Afro-Americans. https://mappingcville.com/

Mapping Dante

Mapping all the geographic references in Dante’s Divine Comedy. http://www.mappingdante.com/

Mapping Decadence

Mapping the networks of the late nineteenth century Parisian decadents. http://mappingdecadence.org/

Mapping Decline

Fascinating investigation into urban decline in St Louis. http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/map/

Mapping Detroit Slavery

Aims “to provide a more complete picture of slavery in the Detroit area for the general public, students, and scholars.” http://mappingdetroitslavery.com/

Mapping Dubliners

Mapping James Joyce’s stories. http://mulliken.okstate.edu/about/

Mapping Du Bois

Recreating Du Bois’ survey of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward http://www.mappingdubois.org/

Update: This site seems to have disappeared; mirror available via Internet Archive.

Mapping Early American Elections

Mapping elections in the early American republic, 1787 to 1825. Plentiful free and open data. http://earlyamericanelections.org/

Mapping Gothic France

12th and 13th century French architecture considered in 3 ways: time, space and narrative. http://mappinggothicfrance.org/

Mapping History

Time-based maps covering 4 continents, in English and German. http://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/index.html

Mapping Manuscript Migrations

Navigating the network of connections between people, institutions, and places within European medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. https://mappingmanuscriptmigrations.org/

Mapping Marronage

“Mapping Marronage is an interactive visualization of the trans-Atlantic networks of intellectual, creative and political exchange created by enslaved people in the 18th and 19th century.” Uses the same code base as ‘Same Boats’ to portray human networks spatially. http://mapping-marronage.rll.lsa.umich.edu/ See also the exchange in Archipelagos 5.

Mapping Medieval Chester

Completed project exploring space, place and identity in Medieval Chester. http://www.medievalchester.ac.uk/index.html

Mapping Memoirs of Montparnasse

Small project on Modernist Paris, based on John Glassco’s memoirs, by Dr Anouk Lang. http://aelang.net/projects/glassco.htm

Mapping Mythology

Interesting idea: to map classical mythology in Post-Antique art. Initially covering New York. http://www.mappingmythology.com/

Mapping Occupation

Mapping Force, Freedom and the Army in Reconstruction United States. http://mappingoccupation.org/

Mapping Our Anzacs

Mapping Australia’s first world war recruits. http://mappingouranzacs.naa.gov.au/default.aspx

Mapping Paintings

Exploring the provenance records of paintings across time. Just one map so far. http://www.mappingpaintings.org/

Mapping Performance Culture: Nottingham 1857-1867

Mid-Victorian entertainments in the Midlands: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/mapmoment/

Mapping Petersburg

A project to map the Petersburg Text, starting with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. http://www.mappingpetersburg.org/

Mapping Population Change in Ireland 1841-1851

Mapping population change during the Great Famine in Ireland: http://ncg.nuim.ie/content/projects/famine/

Mapping Prejudice

Visualizing the hidden histories of race and privilege in the urban landscape through racial covenants. https://www.mappingprejudice.org/

Mapping Radical Tyneside

Mapping the Radical history of North East England. http://radicaltyneside.org/

Mapping Shakespeare’s London

Now live! Graduate project from Kings College London. http://map.shakespeare.kcl.ac.uk/

Mapping Slavery

Excellent site mapping slavery’s heritage in the Netherlands and Dutch New York, with maps of Indonesia ‘under construction.’ In Dutch and English. Mapping Slavery NL

Mapping Texts

A project “experimenting with new methods for finding and analyzing meaningful patterns embedded in massive collections of digital newspapers.” http://mappingtexts.org/

Mapping The City In Film

Nascent project mapping Liverpool on celluloid. http://www.liv.ac.uk/lsa/cityinfilm/index.html

Mapping The Enlightenment

This project focuses on the European periphery in seventeenth and eighteenth century enlightenment networks. https://mapping-the-enlightenment.org/

Mapping The Gay Guides

Mapping the Damron Address Books, guides to gay venues in post-war U.S.A. https://www.mappingthegayguides.org/

Mapping The Gulag

An important project, but so far only using static maps. http://www.gulagmaps.org/

Mapping the Haitian Revolution

Very fine presentation of Haiti and the revolution, and a fine example of chrono-cartography. https://www.mappinghaitianrevolution.com/ See also the exchange in Archipelagos 5.

Mapping The Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Empire

Very interesting project, now with added maps. The interface is significant, aiming to take spatial and temporal uncertainties into account.  http://www.byzantinejewry.net/

Mapping The Klan

From Virginia Commonwealth University, a project to map the ‘second’ Klan, from 1915 to 1940. http://labs.library.vcu.edu/klan/

Mapping The Lakes

Examining literary accounts of the Lake District in Britain, with some excellent theoretical articles. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/mappingthelakes/index.htm

Mapping The Long Women’s Movement

“An experiment with indexing, using, and ultimately understanding oral history in new ways”, based upon accounts of feminist activism in the late twentieth century. http://projects.dhpress.org/lwm/dhp-projects/long-womens-movement/

Mapping The Medieval Urban Townscape

Completed in 2005, a study of new Towns of the late 1200s. http://www.qub.ac.uk/urban_mapping/

Mapping The Republic of Letters

Suite of projects – mostly blurbs rather than the goods – centred on enlightenment correspondence. (Formerly had a flash map of correspondence, but that seems to have disappeared.) https://republicofletters.stanford.edu/

Mapping the Scottish Reformation

Mapping Scottish clergy between 1560 and 1689. https://mappingthescottishreformation.org/

Mapping the Spread of American Slavery

Technically and historically very interesting mapping of slavery in the US, 1790-1860. Project: http://lincolnmullen.com/projects/slavery/ Blog post: http://lincolnmullen.com/blog/the-spread-of-american-slavery/

Mapping Women’s Suffrage

Mapping the Women’s Suffrage movement in England in 1911 – the year of the census and the suffragette boycott of it. https://www.mappingwomenssuffrage.org.uk/

Media NOLA

Histories of culture and cultural production in New Orleans. http://medianola.org/

MESH: Mapping Edinburgh’s Social History

Ambitious project to develop both an atlas of Edinburgh, 1000 – 2000 AD, and create open source tools for creating historic maps. http://www.mesh.ed.ac.uk/

Miéville’s Geolocative Cities

Very interesting project, mapping China Miéville’s sci-fi novel The City and the City; and exploring the possibilities for a “palimpsest or crosshatch” type of mapping.  http://locativeliterature.wordpress.com/

Montréal, l’avenir du passé

Downloadable maps and data (requiring ArcExplorer), focussed on Montreal. In French and English. http://www.mun.ca/mapm/

Morningside Heights Digital History

Micro-mapping project of area now occupied by Columbia University’s main campus in New York. https://mhdh.library.columbia.edu/

Myths on Maps

Mapping classical Greek mythology. http://myths.uvic.ca/

New York City Graffiti and Street Art Project

Flickr, mobile phones and Google maps mash-up investigating NYC street art. http://library.lclark.edu/projects/graffiti/index.php?state=about

Negro Travellers Green Book

“Assured Protection for the Negro Traveler.” Mapping the 1956 edition of the travel guide for Afro-Americans.  http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/greenbookmap.html

Networked Nations

Depicting German Cities in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia. http://www.printedcities.com/

Nolli Map

Interactive version of Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 map of Rome. http://nolli.uoregon.edu/default.asp *Dead link.*

Old Maps Online

A search portal for historical maps hosted elsewhere. http://www.oldmapsonline.org

On The Line

Under construction, but fascinating already, a project on how schooling, housing, and civil rights shaped Hartford, Connecticut (USA) and its suburbs. http://ontheline.trincoll.edu/

Orbis

The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World http://orbis.stanford.edu/

Orlando Furioso Atlas

Mapping “the sprawling world of perhaps the greatest literary work of the Italian Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.” http://www.furiosoatlas.com

OutGoing

Mapping New York City’s lgbt nightlife. http://outgoingnyc.com/

Out of the Desert

Mapping the detention of Japanese and Japanese-Americans in 1942. http://outofthedesert.yale.edu/

Palestine Open Maps

Open maps of Palestine, from 1880 to 1951, with contemporary mapping via Open Street Map, and the post-1945 status of many Palestinian localities. https://palopenmaps.org/

Palimpsest

Just starting out, Palimpsest will visualize Edinburgh’s literary heritage. http://palimpsest.blogs.edina.ac.uk/

Pelagios

PELAGIOS stands for ‘Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems’ – hooray for recursive acronyms! http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/

PhilaPlace

Great site from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on the city of Philadelphia. http://www.philaplace.org/

Phone Booth

Project underway, repackaging the Charles Booth poverty maps into mobile phone formats. http://jiscphonebooth.wordpress.com/

Photogrammar

“Organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).” http://photogrammar.yale.edu/map/

Placing Literature

Crowdsourcing literary locations. http://www.placingliterature.com/home

Placing Segregation

Mapping racial segregation in three cities in the 1860s and 1870s: Washington, Nashville and Omaha. https://dsps.lib.uiowa.edu/placingsegregation/

Pleiades

Repository of historical geographic information about the Greek and Roman World. http://pleiades.stoa.org/

Political Meetings Mapper

Text-mining the movement’s newspapers, this project maps notices of Chartist meetings from the Northern Star newspaper. Site seems to have disappeared, which is a great shame; am following up on this. Political Meetings Mapper

Populations Past

Major project mapping the demography (and more) of England and Wales, 1851 to 1911. https://www.populationspast.org

Power of Attorney in Oaxaca, Mexico

Constructing a geography of indigenous legal culture through digital maps and visualizations.

https://www.powerofattorneynative.com/

Pox Americana

To accompany a book of the same name, a mapping of the American Small Pox epidemic of 1775-1782. http://pox.ehistory.org/

Pride of Place

Mapping England’s LGBT past via crowd-sourcing. https://www.mapme.com/prideofplace

Prohibition Raids in New Orleans, 1919-1933

Part of a larger digital history of drinking culture in New Orleans. http://intemperance.org/neatline/show/raids

Queensland Historical Atlas

The history of Queensland, Australia. http://www.qhatlas.com.au/

Records of Early English Drama

Mapping the places and patrons of early English theatre. http://link.library.utoronto.ca/reed/

Redlining Richmond

Mapping the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s surveys of 1930s Richmond, VA., including their assessment of “‘infiltration of a lower grade population’ (by which they meant African Americans, Jews, and immigrants).” http://dsl.richmond.edu/holc/pages/home

See also the collection of geo-rectified U.S. redlining maps: http://dsl.richmond.edu/holc_national/

Refugee Family Papers

From the Weiner Library, a map of the family papers of Jews fleeing the Nazi regime. http://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/interactivemap

Regnum Francorum Online

Interactive maps of early medieval Europe, 614-840. http://www.francia.ahlfeldt.se/

Renaissance Lyon

Under development, but looking very promising. A manipulation of a giant axonometric scenic map of the French city of Lyon created during the height of the French Renaissance.

http://www.renlyon.org/Lyon1550.html

The Roaring Twenties

A soundmap of New York in the 1920s. http://vectorsdev.usc.edu/NYCsound/777b.html

Romantic London

A research project by Matthew Sangster exploring life and culture in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries using Richard Horwood’s map of London from the 1790s. http://www.romanticlondon.org/

Routes of Sefarad

Impressive Google-supported project mapping Jewish history in Spain. http://www.redjuderias.org/google/index.php

Sagnagrunnur

A geographically mapped database of the main published collections of Icelandic folk legends. http://sagnagrunnur.com/en/

Salem Witch Trials

An archive of materials, and a very interesting animated map. http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/salem/home.html

Same Boats

Remarkable for both the content and the way the code is written for humanistic purposes, this maps the movements and connections of Black writers and artists through and around the Black Atlantic. http://sameboats.org/

Scotland Slavery Map

Using data from the ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership’ project, a map of Edinburgh’s involvement in the slave trade. Now dead, with no working copy at archive.org. http://www.scotlandslaverymap.com/

Separados / Torn Apart

Most definitely a ‘Digital Humanities’ project, but unique on this list for its contemporary political engagement, Separados / Torn Apart maps the United States’ anti-migrant infrastructure and money flows. http://xpmethod.plaintext.in/torn-apart/

Sheffield Cutlery Map

Mapping the cutlery industry in Sheffield, made by Museums Sheffield. http://www.sheffieldcutlerymap.org.uk/

Situating Chemistry

Mapping the development of chemistry, both scientific and institutional, over 1760-1840. http://situatingchemistry.org

Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761

A cartographic analysis of ‘ the greatest slave insurrection in the eighteenth century British Empire.’ http://revolt.axismaps.com/

Space of Slovenian Literary Culture

Project in the planning stages, examining Slovenian writing, 1780-1940. Has a very useful overview of literary mapping. http://sl.wikiversity.org/wiki/Literatura_in_prostor [url updated]

Spatial History Project at Stanford

Many projects and articles. http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/index.php

Spatial Humanities at the Scholars’ Lab

A community-driven resource for the spatial humanities. http://spatial.scholarslab.org/

Streets of Mourning

Due to launch in August, an interactive map of Lancaster’s First World War casualties. Announcement: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/articles/2014/streets-of-mourning-brings-home-first-world-war-carnage/

Texas Freedom Colonies Project

Mapping the Freedom Colonies, or Freedmen’s Towns, founded by African-Americans after the American Civil War. http://www.thetexasfreedomcoloniesproject.com/

Texas Slavery Project

Analyzing the spread of American slavery into the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in the decades between 1820 and 1850. http://www.texasslaveryproject.org/

The Area Told As A Story

Very interesting PhD research project into the non-use of maps. http://folk.uio.no/oeide/dg/

Topografiia Terror

Mapping Moscow’s experience of the Great Terror, covering prisons, and mass execution and burial sites. In Russian. http://topos.memo.ru/

Tracks in Time

West Yorks Archive Service putting historic tithe maps online. A digitisation project, but notable for the way the maps are displayed, alongside (rather than superimposed) contemporary maps. http://www.tracksintime.wyjs.org.uk/

Transatlantic Slave Trade Visualization

“What happens when a historian of slavery teams up with a computer scientist? A stunning visualization of the transatlantic slave trade.” Such gee-whizery about the slave trade is obviously inappropriate. And it’s not stunning, but a rather poor visualization to boot. http://mcb226.github.io/SlaveTrade/

Travelogue

Mapping the travels of twentieth century American authors, starting with Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston. New URL: http://mappingliteraryhistory.org/

Unveiling of Britain

Very interesting prototype of a set of ways in which to interpret a collection of maps; a sort of ‘distance reading’ for cartography. http://www.renlyon.org/agrahamt/Andrew%20Taylor_BLL%20Competition%202015.html Note: now defunct and unarchived.

Urban Transition Historical GIS Project

Using historical census data to examine the United States’ urban transition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. http://www.s4.brown.edu/utp/index.htm

U.S. News Map

The US News Map allows users to search Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers and visualize the results across space and time.But not the caveats concerning the distribution of the newspapers digitized in this article from Viral Texts. http://usnewsmap.com/

Valley of the Shadow

Documenting two counties at the time of the American Civil War, with animated battle maps. http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/

Verbrannte Orte

Mapping Nazi bookburnings. In German, but a brief overview is given by Google Maps Mania. http://verbrannte-orte.de/

Viabundus

Mapping medieval roads. No maps yet, but a blog: http://www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de/roads/blog/

Viae Regiae

Mapping the Transport Network of England & Wales, 1540-1660. https://viaeregiae.org/

Vias Romanas

Roman roads of Castilla and Leon, Spain. http://viasromanas.net/

Vici

A very interesting, and here successful, idea: a geospatial wiki. Vici crowdsources the archaeology of classical antiquity. http://vici.org/

Viennavigator

Mapping Vienna through a wide range of texts. Mainly in German, but has some English texts in there as well. German translation of ‘The Third Man’, before you ask.

http://viennavigator.metaspots.net/front/desktop

Vilniaus Literatūra

Mapping the literature of Vilnia, Lithuania. In Lithuanian. http://www.vilniusliterature.flf.vu.lt/

Venice Time Machine

“Aims at building a multidimensional model of Venice and its evolution covering a period of more than 1000 years.” http://vtm.epfl.ch/

Virtual Morgantown

Seemingly dormant project to build a virtual reconstruction of Morgantown, West Virginia, circa 1900. http://virtualmorgantown.org

Vision of Britain

Remarkable compendium of surveys of Britain. http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/

Visualizing Early Washington DC

Using GIS to build a virtual reconstruction of pre-1814 Washington DC. http://visualizingdc.com/

Visualizing Emancipation

Visualizing Emancipation organizes documentary evidence about when, where, and how slavery fell apart during the American Civil War. http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation/

Visualizing Medieval Places

“A digital project that explores different ways of visualizing real place names extracted from literary and non-literary texts composed along the arc from England to the Eastern Mediterranean over some four centuries (11-15th c).” https://visualizingmedievalplaces.wordpress.com/

Visualizing Scriptoria: Mapping Sites of Manuscript Production in Medieval Iceland

Title says it all. Just as well, given there’s no blurb or description whatsoever. http://projects.cdh.ucla.edu/icelandicms/bin/index.html#

Visualizing the Red Summer

An archive of documents relating to the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919, “a series of over three dozen (known) riots and lynchings throughout the U.S. ” http://visualizingtheredsummer.com

Visualizing Urban Geographies

An open source suite of ‘noGIS’ tools. Examples focus upon Edinburgh. http://geo.nls.uk/urbhist/index.html

Visualizing Venice

Visualizing Venice is a series of inquiries into how social and economic change shaped the city of Venice over time. http://visualizingvenice.org/

Voluntary Hospitals Database

An old database created by the University of Portsmouth, given a new lease of life via the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, with a Google maps interface.  http://www.hospitalsdatabase.lshtm.ac.uk/ See also the IHR blog post for more information.

Voting America

Mapping US elections, 1840 – 2008. http://dsl.richmond.edu/voting/index.html

Walking Ulysses

Annotating Joyce’s Ulysses upon contemporary and current  maps of Dublin. http://ulysses.bc.edu/

Witches

Mapping witch trials in early modern Scotland. http://witches.is.ed.ac.uk/

Witchhunter and Trollfinder

Maps Danish folklore and  tales by theme. Wins best project name award. http://etkspace.scandinavian.ucla.edu/maps/witchhunter.html

Yellow Star Houses

Excellent site mapping ghettoization and the Holocaust in Budapest. In English and Hungarian. http://www.yellowstarhouses.org/

Last updated 28 February 2024, currently listing 236 projects. This list is in the public domain, and may be scraped and repurposed freely.

37 Responses to DH GIS Projects

  1. Pingback: Anterotesis » Digital Humanities GIS projects

  2. Tom Elliott says:

    Hi. You might be interested in including Pleiades: http://pleiades.stoa.org .

    Best,
    Tom

  3. Eric Kansa says:

    Hello. You may also want to include Open Context (http://opencontext.org), which also has some useful geo-spatial search features/API/web services (http://opencontext.org/about/services).

    Thanks!
    -Eric

  4. Will Ippen says:

    You may also be interested in the Spatial History Project at Stanford University. The interdisciplinary center supports several projects on the cutting edge of GIS analysis on historical topics. http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/index.php

  5. David Biggs says:

    We have been exploring historical GIS as a graduate seminar at UC -Riverside. Check out student posts and work at http://nature-space-place.blogspot.com.

    Best,

    David Biggs

  6. Jeremy says:

    Thanks for the great list…very inspiring.

    We’d love to have our site added to the list: New York City Graffiti & Street Art Project. It was the work of a ‘study abroad’ trip to NYC by students from Lewis & Clark College in Portland.

    Thanks,
    Jeremy

  7. Thank you so much for your lovely mention of AddressingHistory on this list. We are working on some further developments at the moment which will hopefully make it an even better resource (more news coming on the blog soon).

    Thanks,

    Nicola Osborne,
    AddressingHistory Project Officer.

  8. Gethin Rees says:

    Our project team are in the process of building an online GIS to disseminate information relating to the Jewish communities of the Byzantine empire. You may want to add our project’s website http://www.mjcb.eu to this list.

    Keep up the good work! Thanks,

    Gethin Rees

  9. There are also a number of historical GIS projects about Kyoto. Ritsumeikan University has a Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Culture funded by the MEXT Global COE program. They have published a book whose English title is “Historical GIS of Kyoto” (part of the book is in English) that discusses a number of projects about Kyoto. See http://www.arc.ritsumei.ac.jp/lib/GCOE/guideline_e.html

  10. Hi, John — this is a great list! We’d like to invite you and anyone else interested in building a community-edited index of interesting work in digital humanities GIS to contribute to the “Projects and Groups” or “Readings and Research” sections of Spatial Humanities: http://spatial.scholarslab.org/

    This website was one outcome of a two-year NEH-funded “Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship” held at the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab. The bibliography sections of the site are Zotero-based, so anyone can join in and add content. Here’s how:

    http://spatial.scholarslab.org/contribute/

    Spatial Humanities also features essays by Jo Guldi on the spatial turn across the disciplines, peer-reviewed “Step by Step” tutorials, and GIS-related feeds from social media and Q&A sites, including DH Answers. Institute participants (including humanities scholars, map and GIS librarians, and software developers) helped to define the needed sections of the site, and were especially interested in the creation of a common and crowdsourced index of projects like the one you’re building here.

    Best,
    Bethany

  11. Thank you John for this aggregation.
    Your work mentioned here: http://www.kosson.ro
    I have mirrored the resource bundle here: http://www.kosson.ro/index.php?option=com_weblinks&view=category&id=119%3Adh-gis-projects&Itemid=23&lang=ro

    A nice day!

  12. Pingback: Spatial Humanities Incubator Group » Blog Archive » Hello world!

  13. Pingback: Resources for October 10: Discussion questions, GIS, NEH grants

  14. Pingback: Spatial Humanities Incubator Group – Tomorrow @ Noon – UNC Digital Scholarship Group

  15. pete insole says:

    Great list but can you add our Know Your Place http://www.bristol.gov.uk/knowyourplace please.
    Thanks
    Pete

  16. John Bradley says:

    Stephen Baxter’s Profile of the Doomed Elite project continues work on identifying people in Domesday Book that was begun in phase II of the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England. Using a combination of information from Domesday, including spatial information about the estates, the Profile team have been able to make strong cases for the identity of a large number of new individuals in the mass of names that appears in Domesday. Their work will shortly be published through an enlarged version of PASE. The geo-spatial information enabled through GIS is a key component in the research.

    http://domesday.pase.ac.uk/, and
    http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/research/projects/current/pde.aspx

    There is a good explanation about the goals and methdology of PDE at

    http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/tag/prosopography-of-a-doomed-elite/

  17. Pete Insole says:

    I’ve just seen your latest blog on this and I congratulate you again on this list, but I’m not sure why you haven’t got Know Your Place on the list as I suggested before. Perhaps it is because you think it is just a resource of old maps?
    Know Your Place won the ESRI Local Government Vision Award, 2011 not just because it provides access to historic archives, but because it also provides access to all our heritage GI data and crowd sources personal archives. Because the site is maintained by the Bristol Historic Environment Record it is directly linked to planning policy. This means that any public contributions to the website becomes a potential material consideration in any planning decision. Since going live the site has received 800 public contributions to the community layer.
    The website is also being used to enable members of the public to nominate local heritage assets for the Bristol Local List.

  18. johnl says:

    Added to list.

    John

  19. Daniel Alves says:

    Great list, John!
    Can I suggest two more sites, from Portuguese projects?
    They are in Portuguese, but have some of the information in English, also.
    One is the Atlas, Historical Cartography, available here: http://atlas.fcsh.unl.pt/
    The other is Atlas of literary landscapes of mainland Portugal, available here: http://paisagensliterarias.ielt.org/
    Thanks
    Daniel Alves

  20. johnl says:

    Both added – thanks for the info.

    John

  21. Pingback: GIS (10/14) | Michael Pak

  22. Pingback: Geolocating Beszel and Ul Qoma | Miéville's Geolocative Cities

  23. Indeed, the GeoHumanities SIG of ADHO (http://geohumanities.org) will soon be undertaking coordination of a repository of projects, resources and tools related to geographic inquiry in humanities scholarship. This “GeoDiRT” project will be coordinated closely with the broader DiRT initiative, and we hope become the crowd-sourced resource you speak of. Thanks for maintaining this — it *will* be scraped, with gratitude!

  24. Hi John, the Digital Karnak Project (created at UCLA) offers both temporal maps and 3D models tracing change at an ancient Egyptian temple over 2500 years. Not a traditional “GIS” project, but a different way to map, interpret, and visualize historical data (in 3D!).

  25. Andreas Kunz says:

    Hi John,

    you may want to include on your list the German Historical GIS, compiled between 2003 and 2007:

    http://www.hgis-germany.de

    It’s mainly in German, but it does habe an English navigation.

  26. Pingback: Re: Have a favorite Digital History web site? Tell us about it! | archaeoINaction

  27. Impressive list, which portends exciting things for the future.
    Would you consider a geocoded collection of landscape paintings to belong here?
    1,700 paintings have thus far been pinned to vantage point of the painter at
    http://www.GeocodedArt.com

  28. johnl says:

    That’s a very impressive collection. Could you say something about where you found the images, how you do the geo-coding and whether you’re going to release the data?
    Thanks,
    John

  29. John,
    The images have been, and continue to be, culled from a variety of sources of public domain sources (e.g. The Athenaeum.org). Geocoding is done one at a time; release of the data has not been requested, and the response would depend on what use it would be put to.

  30. gus says:

    Maybe , can add memories of Patagonia Austral

  31. johnl says:

    Any maps on that site?

  32. Hannah says:

    Not sure if this quite fits in scope, and I know it to be wildly incomplete, but: http://pinballmap.com/

  33. This is a great list – thank you! Perhaps you would consider adding my historical GIS of the Russian Empire? (the map is here: http://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/886)

  34. This list is fabulous! Here are two bearly new projects that use GIS and spatial analysis to visualize newspapers published along the US-Mexico border in the 19th and 20th centuries, Borderlands Archives Cartography, and the mechanisms of ICE in the 21th century, Torn Apart / Separados.

  35. johnl says:

    Thanks; both projects added. I’ve been following the Separados project for a while, but somehow never twigged it should be on this list. It is unique for its contemporary political engagement.

    John

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.