Resurse web

Due to Google’s digitization programme, the information now available is unprecedented: but what exactly is there, and how can it be used? The Google Ancient Places (GAP) project investigates a means of facilitating the discovery of data that is of interest to scholars working on the ancient world, and experiments with ways of making use of the results.

So, for example, with GAP you’ll be able to discover all references in the Google Books corpus to a particular ancient place, and then visualize the results in GoogleEarth to gain a snapshot of the geographic spread of the references. Or, alternatively, you’ll be able to discover all ancient places mentioned in a specific book, and visualize them in GoogleMaps as and when they are mentioned alongside the actual text. In the first instance you know the place and want to find the books; in the second, you have the book and want to discover the places. And you’ll be able to do this either as a scholar whose research has a historical or geographical basis, or as a member of the public visiting, for instance, an ancient location and wanting to download information related to it on your iphone―a case of literally putting knowledge into people’s hands.

The Grubstreet Project is a digital edition of 18th-century London. It aims to map the city and its texts to create both a historically accurate visualization of the city's commerce and communications, and a record of how its authors and artists portrayed it.

Grub Street, now subsumed by Milton Street, was both a real place and an abstract idea. For authors such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, it represented base commercialization, hack writing, and the prostitution of literary ideals. Its historical record, however obscure, presents a more complex scene, and one that is difficult to trace. Where, exactly, was "over against the lower Pump in Grub-street" (where one might find the printer John Clowes) or "in Grub-street neer the upper pump" (Bernard Alsop) or "near the Upper-Pump in Grubstreet" (Elizabeth Alsop)? What is left to us are the traces of this topography in maps (Strype, Horwood), in texts (The Dunciad), and in images.

Therefore, HESTIA aims to enrich the discussion of space that is ongoing in classical scholarship, as evidenced by a specialist panel at the 2007 Classical Association Conference dedicated to exploring the interactions of monuments, spaces and rituals in Delphi and Athens.

Yet, while this example shows the interest in space within archaeology and History, there has been little recent work on submitting ancient Greek literary texts to spatial examination, which is all the more surprising for Herodotus given that over a generation ago Immerwahr (1966) demonstrated the importance of natural boundaries to Herodotus' conception of History.

"Hidden Patterns of the Civil War" collects a number of interrelated projects on the sectional crisis, slavery, and emancipation during the Civil War era, with a particular emphasis on the histories of the city of Richmond and the state of Virginia.

Grouped as "texts" and "maps," these projects use digital tools and digital media to uncover and represent patterns that are not easy to find when we look at particular pieces of evidence in isolation and only become evident when we visualize a wealth of evidence in graphs, maps, and models. Revealing patterns in text and across time and space, many of these visualizations are intriguing and surprising, offering us new insights into this dramatic era of intense social, political, and military conflict.

HIS stands for Geographic Information and GIS for history.

This is a digital package to process spatial information: cards on the screen behind them information about what to see. Each card tables associated with text and numbers. Conversely, all the tables again linked to a card. The most famous is the GIS Tomtom, for navigating in the here and now. With HISGIS can be traveled in the past. The foundation is composed of the oldest digitized register (from 1832).

Holocaust Geographies is a multi-institution collaboration on an NSF-sponsored grant received by geographers Anne Knowles and Alberto Giordano. Across five studies, the project examines spaces and places of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was a profoundly geographical event that caused mass displacement and migration, destroyed or fundamentally changed thousands of communities, and created hundreds of new places for the concentration of population, the exploitation of labor, and the mass murder of millions of people. As the Third Reich's ultimate solution to create a racially pure German empire, the Holocaust drove the mobilization of infrastructure and resources on an unprecedented scale. Yet the spatial characteristics and temporal dynamics of the Holocaust have scarcely been studied as explicitly geographical phenomena. Nor have scholars critically considered the complex and varied range of scales at which the events constituting the Holocaust took place, from the scale of the individual body to the continental expanse of Europe.

HyperCities is a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. With the generous support of the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, the HyperCities Los Angeles Research Collection has launched.

The “Los Angeles Research Collection” empowers citizens and researchers to use the tools of interactive “time mapping.” With HyperCities, you can explore social, cultural, and political history in Los Angeles over time. The site can be accessed from a web-browser in any school, community center, government office, home, and academic setting, allowing citizens to delve into and create their own collections of mappable knowledge and cultural heritage. Community-generated content exists side-by-side with scholar-produced research data, thereby creating new interactions between traditionally separated domains of knowledge.

The rich and varied history of Kansas City can be examined through the literature surrounding its locales. This literary map, inspired by a Manhattan literary map that appeared in the New York Times Book Review in June of 2005, took roughly five months to compile, and includes suggestions and annotations from many of the staff at the Johnson County Library.

I selected the titles based on their references to Kansas City landmarks, and ones that delineated different time periods. From pre-Civil War times to current development in suburban Kansas City, these titles encompass many of the sites that make this city such a vibrant place to live. Special thanks go to Brian Oertel for his wonderful graphic talents (and patience!) and to Amy Ostrom for her ability to translate print into a Rich Internet Application. -Susan Bogart, Reference Librarian

The Linguistic Geographies project has helped to explain how maps were produced in the Middle Ages.

Generally very little is known of the processes that were involved in medieval map-making. As visual objects such maps continue to fascinate and mystify modern audiences, as is the case with the ‘Gough Map of Great Britain’ – named after one of its former antiquarian owners, Richard Gough (1735-1809).

Literary geographical methods form the basis of an entirely new, spatially structured, cartographically supported literary history – a literary atlas of Europe.

This interactive mapping project makes visible the multiple relationships between real and imaginary geographies, and adequately represents the spaces of fiction. The following institutions are participants in the pilot version of the Literary Atlas of Europe: Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich (CH); Georg August University, Göttingen (D), Charles University, Prague (CZ).

Locating London’s Past will create an intuitive Geographical Interface System (GIS) that will enable researchers to map and visualize textual and artefactual data relating to seventeenth and eighteenth-century London against a fully rasterised version of John Rocque’s 1746 map of London and the first accurate modern OS map (1869-80). More than this, it will make these data and maps available within a Google Maps container, allowing for the analysis of the data with open source visualization tools. The interface will be readily expandable to include additional data sets and maps (both modern and historic).

Building on the partnerships created through the JISC funded Connected Histories project, and through a new collaboration with the Museum of London Archaeological Service (MOLA), Locating London’s Past will produce a working GIS-enabled public web environment that will allow existing electronic historical data about London to be repackaged and organised around space.

The Map of Early Modern London maps the streets, sites, and significant boundaries of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century London (1560-1640).

Taking the "Agas" map as its platform, the project links encyclopedia-style articles, scholarly work, student work, editions, and literary texts to the places mentioned therein. Students will view the landmarks of Shakespeare's London, and learn about the history and culture of the city in which he lived and worked. Teachers will find the map and index useful in teaching Renaissance plays and other texts set in London. Scholars are welcome to contribute articles, links, or compilations of data.

A Geographic Chronology of Willa Cather's Life.

The maps were composed in ArcView 9.2, using a combination of digital census geography, archival maps, and historical and contemporary datasets.

The base map for the home and the documents pages is Plate I from N.M Fenneman, Geology and Mineral Resources of the St. Louis Quadrangle (United States Geological Survey, Bulletin 438, 1911). The base map for the other map series is the ESRI shaded world relief layer, based on the USGS’s National Elevation Data (NED) data.

This research, education, and outreach project is dedicated to using new technology and archival data to recreate the survey W.E.B. Du Bois conducted of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward for his 1899 classic book, The Philadelphia Negro.

In addition to introducing students to the power of geographic information systems (GIS) mapping and the fun of analyzing primary historical documents, we aim to draw attention to the history of the vibrant African American community that once lived in Center City. We also hope that, by engaging people in this fascinating story about Du Bois' research and the people he studied, we can facilitate an honest dialog about how race has shaped cities like Philadelphia and continues to shapes our lives.

With a database of images, texts, charts and historical maps, Mapping Gothic France invites you to explore the parallel stories of Gothic architecture and the formation of France in the 12th and 13th centuries, considered in three dimensions: space, time, narative.

The modules in this section on European history were developed by historians at the University of Oregon and the Universität Münster.

The editors: James Mohr and John Nicols, Department of History, Oregon and Professors Peter Funke and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger of Münster) . The authors include the editors as well as Amanda Drap and Andrea Pratt (University of Oregon) as well as Engelbert Winter, Malte Schmiedhäuser, Michael Jung, and Nikola Moustakis (Universtät Münster).

This project brings together scholars working in the disciplines of literary studies, geography, archaeology and history to explore how material and imagined urban landscapes construct and convey a sense of place-identity.

The focus of the project is the city of Chester and the identities that its inhabitants formed between c.1200 and 1500. A key aspect of the project is to integrate geographical and literary mappings of the medieval city using cartographic and textual sources and using these to understand more how urban landscapes in the Middle Ages were interpreted and navigated by local inhabitants. One particularly innovative dimension of this is the project's use of information technologies both as a means of exploring these 'mappings' of medieval Chester, for example through the use and development of a Geographical Information System (GIS) to create a map of Chester as it was c.1500, and as a means of widening access and public interest in Chester's medieval past and in medieval urban studies generally by linking literary and cartographic sources in digital media. The project will thus not only extend our understanding of how placed-identities were forged in the medieval city through local association and relationships with imagined and material urban landscapes, but also foster transferable methodologies and working models for integrating visual and textual digital data sources in humanities computing projects.

Literary cartography employs mapping techniques not to illustrate texts, but to interrogate them. Using geographic data of both place names and descriptions to produce geo-spatial visualizations for analysis enhances understanding of the interaction of literature and place. Adding layers of historical data through the use of cartograms and old maps enables a broader picture of the various dimensions of life in the city in different periods, and their relation to the images of the city in literature, to emerge.

This project is generously funded by an Innovation Grant from the College Teaching and Learning Fund. We would like to express our gratitude to the fund, and to our Graduate Teaching Assistants Sarah Lewis and Jennifer Young, Paul Vetch, Beatriz Caballero and Geoffroy Noel at the Centre for Computing and the Humanities, Professor Josephine McDonagh, Head of the English Department, and all the members of the London Shakespeare Centre.