Week 6: Maps

1. Week 6 Overview
2. Week 6 Reading and Discussion
3. Week 6 Lab: Simple geo-referencing and map-building with KnightLabs StoryMaps.js

Week 6 Overview

Maps and Spatial History

Historians have long embedded concepts of space in their work: center and periphery, borders and borderlands, historical arguments dependent on trends in geographic isolation or urban density. Maps have also long been a staple of history monographs, though usually these maps are static and few and far between, owing to the cost of printing even a black-and-white figure in a book.

That makes maps both the easiest of digital-history concepts to talk about and also the hardest to unpack.

Reading: Our independent reading will focus on two specific maps and the historical arguments made from them. One is in the Journal of Digital History, which complicates the spatial history experience by exposing the data and interactive elements of the project (Regan). The other is more straightforward in its presentation but addresses the concept of counter-mapping, or the idea of using the tools of mainstream mapping to tell subaltern stories.

Lab: We’ll use KnightLab’s StoryMaps.js to introduce you to a point-and- click mapping platform that’s a little more complex than Google’s mymaps.google.com but similarly simplifies the mapping process.. See Week 6 Lab: Simple geo-referencing and map-building with KnightLabs StoryMaps.js home walkthrough. This week’s lab is designed for you to explore at home and troubleshoot/discuss in class. Note that the reading is shorter to make time for that.

OTHER EXAMPLES FROM CLASS:

• https://public.websites.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/
• https://kalanicraig.com/dossier/#service-to-the-public

Collaborative data management: none

Week 6 Reading and Discussion

This week our theory/methods readings are combined. We Links to an external site.

• Amanda Regan, “Secret Societies and Revolving Doors: Using Mapping the Gay Guides to Study LGBTQ Life in the United States, 1965-1989.” Journal of Digital History , 3(1), 2024. https://doi.org/JDH.2023.0011.R1?locatt=label:JDHFULL

• Lacey Schauwecker, “Sight and Sound: Counter-mapping the U.S.-Mexico Border Crisis”, Digital Humanities Quarterly, http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/16/3/000626/000626.html

If you’re working with pre-modern maps, also have a look at one of the projects I’m working on. Videntes (Latin for “acts of seeing”) works with multispectral imaging to recover lost and damaged ink. One of our projects is the re-imaging of a T-O map, a map in which Africa, Europe and Asia are arranged inside an “O” with the Mediterranean forming a T drawn inside the O. Africa sits above the crossbar of the T, with Europe and Asia on either side of the T descender: https://videntesmsi.com/2023/12/03/vercelli-map-published- in-virtual-mappa-project/ , with full annotations at https://sims2.digitalmappa.org/36

Advanced exemplar reading: Photogrammar’s design and codeis useful for exploring how a top-to-bottom custom-coded interface is built, not just technically but in design terms. See more detail in the Additional Resources section of Week 6 Lab: Simple geo-referencing and map-building with KnightLabs StoryMaps.js

**

Discussion :

Consider how the authors of our articles might answer these questions.

• What does a map-based visual add to spatial analysis that text cannot do?
• When does a map-based visual get in the way of an argument?
• What happens when historical spatial data and modern spatial data are at odds with each other?
• How do we show change over time on a static map?
• What historiographic considerations do we need to keep in mind if we reshape an old map to meet modern technical requirements? (Geo-referencing or warping; see this week’s lab?) **

Week 6 Lab: Simple geo-referencing and map-building with KnightLabs

StoryMaps.js

Lab background

This week, we’ll jump into the KnightLab ecosystem. KnightLab, at Northwestern, has a number of point-and-click tools that are helpful for early-career digital historians looking to prototype their work. StoryMaps.js is free and uses Google Spreadsheets data to tell a story with maps; don’t confuse this with ArcGIS StoryMap, which is costly and less dependent on free tools.

We’re also going back to the Programming Historian, this time with a secondary bit of news from KnightLabs that helps update some of the user-interface choices made in the Programming Historian tutorial.

Terms and considerations

Geo-referencing is a way of stretching historical maps to “fit” “proper” latitudinal and longitudinal data. As you’re working with this tutorial, think about what “fit” and “proper” mean in the context of quite literally changing a primary-source map to suit modern mapping requirements.

Lab

• Erica Y. Hayes and Mia Partlow, “Displaying a Georeferenced Map in KnightLab’s StoryMap JS,” Programming Historian 11 (2022), https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0098 , https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/displaying-georeferenced-map-knightlab-storymap-js
• When you get to the “basemap selection” , you’ll need a StoryMap JS user-interface update guide: https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/2023/10/06/storymapjs-update/

NB:Mia Partlow is an IU MA/MLS degree recipient and an Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities alumna, so we’re using something that one of you could literally write someday.

Help at IU

Send an email to Drew Heiderscheidt, dheider@iu.edu (and cc Theresa Quill, theward@iu.edu) to schedule a mapping consult.

Further resources on mapping

• QGIS is the open-source free alternative to ArcGIS, which is what many of IU’s GIS courses use. Download QGIS. Export data from MyMaps.google.com to QGIS and vice versa. See Jim Clifford, Josh MacFadyen, and Daniel Macfarlane, “Installing QGIS 2.0 and Adding Layers,” Programming Historian 2 (2013), https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0031
• Leaflet is a Javascript library that lets you display super-customized interactive maps in a web-browser interface. Many, but not all, high-end digital-history mapping projects use or have used Leaflet at some point in their development. Kim Pham, “Web Mapping with Python and Leaflet,” Programming Historian 6 (2017), https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0070
• Gazetteers are place-name dictionaries that help you match places to lat/long coordinates without having to manually find/enter those coordinates. The Getty Thesaurus of Place Names is the one I turn to regularly. For more on creating your own, Susan Grunewald and Ruth Mostern, “Working with Named Places: How and Why to Build a Gazetteer,” Programming Historian 13 (2024), https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0117
• Photogrammar’s design and code is useful for exploring how a top-to-bottom custom-coded interface is built, not just technically but in design terms.
• Design: the team built wireframes to guide the development of the project, so that they were working from a comprehensive set of visual guides everyone had agreed on up front. Of course, things change, but having a document like this is valuable for technical collaborators, historical collaborators, and designers alike. https://photogrammar.org/static/designDoc.pdf
• Technical: It uses a React.js platform (the Javascript library Facebook introduced, which now powers a good portion of the interactive Web) and all of the code is in a Github library for forking (copying) and reuse at https://github.com/americanpanorama/photogrammar. The documentation below the code folders is spectacular and a great example of how open-source code can contribute more than just its code to the community.