Spatial Humanities: GIS/Mapping 101

Before we get into the heart of Spatial Humanities, we are going to continue to learn by doing through work on our collective class project of creating a hybrid digital/analog 3D model of Carleton’s Campus.

As with all DH projects, there are many steps to this process.  Last week, you already been gathering your sources.  You’ve selected a building to model, searched the archives for historic images of them, and gathered their metadata in a spreadsheet.  The next steps we’ll take today move on to the processing stage of DH project building:

• Choosing a building as yours
• Researching the building in the archives to find images and historical information about it
• Building a collective website on the buildings’ history
• Making a digital map of campus
• Laser cutting a physical version of the digital map
• Refining a 3D model of your building
• 3D printing a physical version of the digital model
• Putting it all together by placing the building models on the map and linking them to the online information

Metadata & Omeka 2.0

We’ll accomplish the first task by importing our spreadsheet data into Omeka to better leverage the data and metadata.

Then we’ll start looking at how to make digital maps, which we’ll pick up next time.

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Populating Omeka

Omeka is a content management system and web publishing platform, much like WordPress or Drupal.

 A few things set Omeka apart and make it a favorite for DH projects

1. It was created by humanities scholars specifically for humanities projects, unlike most other platforms that have had to be hacked for humanist scholarship.  Specifically, it was built by the folks at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, who also developed Zotero.
2. It has robust support for metadata, by default the Dublin Core specification, a set of categories widely used by libraries, museums and cultural heritage organizations.

It’s primary use is in building collections—of documents, artifacts, images, etc.—and then organizing them into categories and allowing you to build Exhibits that tell a story from your primary sources.

Accessing our Repository

The repository we’ll be using for this project is one I set up through my Reclaim Hosting server:

Carleton College Building History (https://campushistory.medhieval.com) 

Click the link above to explore the front end of the website.

• How is the site organized?
• How is it similar to, or different than, the sites we’ve interacted with before?
• What ways are there to navigate around and find the content you desire?

You should have received an email invitation to join the site, and you can follow the link there to create a password and log in.

If you did not receive an email

• go to the login page and hit the forgot password link

• Enter your Carleton email address and follow the link in the email you receive to set a password and log in

Once you’re at the backend, have a look around and compare this view of the repository to the front end.

• What can you do as an admin that you couldn’t do as a user?
• How is the organization similar to our different than WordPress?

Adding content to Omeka the slow way

Adding an ITEM to Omeka is similar to creating a POST in WordPress, but with more attention to metadata fields and less formatting control.

Choose an item from your research and follow the instructions at Miriam Posner’s tutorial to Add an Item to Omeka

• Copy and paste all the field data from the spreadsheet in the appropriate fields
• Upload your image to the Files tab

Does the way the site thinks make more sense of the research you did and the way we organized the data?

Adding data the FAST WAY with CSV Import

Adding items and uploading photos one by one is SLOW.

In order to get our data in faster, we are using the CSV Import plugin to add the files from our shared Google drive folder and automatically associate all the attached metadata in our spreadsheet.  

I will walk through the steps of this process together to add the rest of our images.

The process is not perfect and there are some files that didn’t come through.  Try to find your sources and see how well you did entering your information.

We will have much more joy by cleaning our data first in Sheets, Excel, OpenRefine or other options.

Creating Collections and Exhibits

The primary ways you organize data in Omeka are to tag items, organize them in collections, or create Exhibits from them.  These terms mirror their counterparts in the museum world.

• Collections are thematic groups of items and each item can be in only one (think one room in the museum’s permanent collection)
• Exhibits are more flexible and are how you — as curator of your online museum — tell a story by combining items with text and organizing them in new ways.  Items can be in multiple exhibits.

In-class Exercise

1. Find all of the items you have uploaded and fix them, if they’re broken.
   • Edit the item, navigate to files, and upload the correct files directly.
2. Create a New Exhibit for your building
   THIS WILL SERVE AS THE MAIN “SITE” FOR YOUR BUILDING
   • add at least one page with some descriptive text
   • and add a gallery to show all the images associated with that building

See my example gallery on Willis Hall as a model, and check out the resources below if you need help.

Omeka Resources

For a good introduction to Omeka, see Johanna Drucker’s Omeka 101

• What is Omeka?

For more overall introduction to Omeka and instructions on setting up free accounts with Omeka.net, see these two tutorials from Miriam Posner at the Programming Historian site:

• Up and Running with Omeka.net
• Creating an Omeka.net Exhibit

For information on CSV import, customizing themes, Neatline and more, check out this fantastic and detailed Omeka admin guide for getting started up Omeka.org with the most common and useful plugins from Nicole Riesenberger et al. at UMD.

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Spatial Humanities

For the next two weeks we will be exploring the spatial humanities — a vibrant and increasingly popular area of digital humanities research.   Humanities scholarship is currently undergoing a “spatial turn” akin to the quantitative, linguistic and cultural “turns” of previous decades, and many are arguing that the widespread adoption of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology and user-friendly neogeography tools are fundamentally reshaping the practice of history and other disciplines.  Yet while these powerful computer tools are certainly new, the mode of thinking “spatially” is not unprecedented, and may in fact be seen as a move away from the universalizing tendencies of modern western scholarship towards more traditional understandings of the lived experience of place, emphasizing the importance of the local context.

In practice, much of this scholarship involves creating maps — an act that is not without controversy.  Maps are conventional representations of space that come laden with the embedded cultural worldviews of their makers.  Maps are also highly simplified documents that often paper over contested or fuzzy boundaries with firm lines; it is hard to express ambiguity with maps, but it is very easy to lie with them.

The familiarity of widespread tools like Google Maps and Google Earth might fool us into thinking these are unproblematic representations of space, but it must be remembered that all maps contain embedded assumptions and cannot be taken at face value. Maps produced in the course of humanities scholarship are not just illustrations but arguments, and they must be read with the same level of critical analysis that you would apply to articles or monographs.

(For more concrete suggestions along these lines, see Humanizing Maps: An Interview with Johanna Drucker.)

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Example 1

One area of historical research that saw an early adoption of GIS is economic land use.  A good example is Michael McCormick’s book on the Origins of the European Economy, which layered many different types of evidence against each other in a GIS to argue for a much earlier origin to Europe’s medieval economy than had been accepted previously.  McCormick has since made his database publicly available and continues to add to it with collaborators at Harvard, as the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization.

The DARMC provides a rich resource and a good introduction to the potential of GIS to reveal patterns and connections through the spatial layering of disparate datasets.  It also offers a good orientation to the basic layout of most GIS systems, with a map view window on the right and a list of layers on the left that can be turned on and off.

Explore the DARMC.

• What layers have been included?
• What patterns show up when you juxtapose cultural, environmental and economic data in this way?
• What connections do you see?
• The developers recently made the decision to separate the layers into four distinct maps (compare the list at right with the image of the old version above).
  • What potential patterns might be lost as a result of this decision? 
  • Are there any problems you foresee with the arguments this decision makes? 

• Also take the opportunity to explore the measurement tools at the top of the window to interrogate the spatial  attributes of the data.

Example 2

The quantitative data compiled in projects like the DARMC can help address many historical problems, but they don’t necessarily answer more qualitative research questions concerned with the lived experience of the past.  For this objective, we must move beyond birds-eye-view 2D maps of spatial distributions and attempt to visualize particular places at particular moments in time.  Such “geovisualization” — the digital reconstruction of past landscapes — is another booming area of scholarship that allows us to virtually experience a place as it might have been, and also has the potential to answer important scholarly questions.

Anne Kelly Knowles’ digital reconstruction of the Battle of Gettysburg is an excellent example of this potential that uses a combination of digitized information from historical maps, documentary accounts and environmental data on the physical geography of the battlefield to answer the question of what the generals could see during the battle and how those sightlines influenced their decision making.

• Read the brief introductory article at Smithsonian magazine and then explore the “story map” in detail.
  • How does the map combine geographic and temporal information?
  • Does it effectively give you a sense of the experience of being on the battlefield?
  • What does this reconstruction offer that more traditional publications could not?
  • What could be improved in the representation?

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Group Exercise: The Varieties of Maps

(Exercise borrowed from Lincoln Mullen)

The next step is to become familiar with as wide a variety of maps as possible, including digital maps and analog, maps that have been made by scholars and maps that have not. Below is a list of online mapping projects.

In a group, pick three projects from the list to explore and compare. Your aim is to gain familiarity with projects involving maps and mapmaking, both by scholars and on the web generally.

• American Migrations to 1880
• Atlantic Networks Project
• Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States
• Counties Blue and Red, Moving Right and Left
• Digital Harlem
• Digital Harrisburg
• Flowing Data: Coffee, Pizza, Burgers
• Geography of the Post
• Going to the Show
• Hestia: Home for Geospatial Analysis of Herodotus’s Histories
• Hidden Florence
• Histories of the National Mall
• History Pin
• Holocaust Geographies Collective
• How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage
• Hypercities
• Locating London’s Past
• A Map of Baseball Nation, Baseball’s Second-Place Favorites: Go, Mets
• Mapping the Republic of Letters
• Mapping the State of the Union
• Mapping Texts
• Map of Early Modern London
• Mapping Gothic France
• Mapping the Medieval Townscape
• Mapping Poverty in America
• Midterm Elections
• Murder Map
• NYPL Map Warper
• Orbis
• PhilaPlace
• Pelagoios
• Pleiades
• Stop and Frisk is All But Gone from New York
• Railroads and the Making of Modern America
• Ben Schmidt, Mapping ship logs
• Spread of U.S. Slavery, 1790–1860
• Stanford Spatial History Project
• Travelers in the Middle East Archive
• Visualizing Emancipation

As you look through these projects, consider the following questions or prompts.

• What categories do these maps fit into? Start to envision a taxonomy of maps by considering the purposes of the maps, their audience, and their interfaces, among other axes of comparison.
• What is the grammar of mapping? In other words, what are the typical symbols that mapmakers use, and how can they be put in relation to one another?
• Which maps stood out to you as especially good or clear? Why?
• Which maps were the worst? What made them bad?
• How do scholarly maps differ from non-scholarly maps?
• What kind of data is amenable to mapping? What kinds of topics
• What accompanies maps? Who controls their interpretation? What is their role in making an argument?
• How do recent web maps compare to maps made online in the past few years? Are any of them broken? How can maps be made sustainable?
• Which of these maps are in your discipline? Which maps might be helpful models for your discipline?

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Exercise (Georeferencing)

In order to reconstruct past landscapes like the Gettysburg battlefield, the first step is often digitizing the data recorded in a historic map by georeferencing (or to be more precise georectifying) that image — that is, aligning the historical map or image with its location on the earth in a known coordinate system.  There are many ways to do this, and traditional desktop GIS software is still often the most precise, but we will start with a cloud based solution requiring no complex software.

The David Rumsey Map Collection is a vast archive of scanned historic maps, mostly covering North and South America.  They have enabled a crowd sourcing technique to get the public to help georeference these images for use in GIS applications.  The previous version was very buggy and not very accurate, but they have made improvements recently in version 4.

Georectify a historic map

• Go to the David Rumsey Georeferencer page
• Use the “Fix Location of a Map” button to find a random map to georectify
  • You can use the Next button in the bottom right to page through some more options if you don’t like the first
  • NB: You may need to sign up for a free account if you don’t accept the first couple they offer you
• Once you’ve found a map that interests you, use their tools to
  • Search, pan and zoom to find locations in the image
  • Set control points (at least 5 are recommended) by identifying the same place on the image and a modern map
  • Clip the map area
  • Save to rectify the map
  • When you are finished, you will see the map overlaid on a basemap of the world and can compare your work to other historic maps of the same place

If you need additional instruction, there are detailed steps on the Georeferencer HELP page

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Assignment

1. When you are finished, get the sharing link and post your thoughts on the process along with the link to your work in a COMMENT ON THIS PAGE.
   • Did this process change your understanding of the spatial DH projects you explored earlier?
2. Continue to work on your Omeka Exhibit and get to know this platform better.
   • Note areas where you would want more formatting control
     
     OPTIONAL: this theme is being developed by one of our Digital Scholarship Interns and if you have changes you would like to suggest you can post an issue on the Github Repository

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Resources

Lincoln Mullen of the Center for New Media and History at George Mason University has developed a fantastic resource for getting started with mapping for the humanities.

The Spatial Humanties Workshop site he developed will give you a detailed introduction to the different types of maps you might want to make as a digital humanist, the software and libraries that are out there to use, and most importantly the academic issues and theoretical questions that are raised by mapping humanities data in a digital space.

NB: Another great tool for online rectifying is MapWarper, which lets you upload your own maps and align them to modern geography.

For an alternate tool, follow these instructions from Lincoln Mullen to Georectify a map with MapWarper