The Pop-Up Map Studio is a one-day workshop that invites librarians and library staff to learn about mapping technologies AND build actual map-based, data-driven applications for use in their home communities. Throughout the day, attendees will alternate between informative training sessions and building their own map-related project, while working with professional cartographers.
In this tutorial, we download public library data from the IMLS data catalog, explore and transform it, and then use it as the starting point for a custom map visualization in Google Maps. Topics explored include open data, CSV, KML, and Google Maps.
In this tutorial, we explore building community maps with Google's most user-friendly mapping tool, My Maps. Community members can collaborate on mapping community resources, challenges, parks and schools, or anything else! No technical expertise or experience required!
"Faith in the City: Chicago's Religious Diversity in the Era of the World's Fair" [Note: the exhibit is currently offline while The Newberry re-organizes their digital exhibits.] is a digital humanities project focused on religious movements and figures in Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The project, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and The Newberry Library, displays hundreds of historical points as well as essays from over a dozen prominent scholars related to the theme. The map technology allows visitors to toggle between a custom-generated modern map layer of Chicago and a georeferenced panoramic map from the 1890s, seeing how neighborhoods and the city itself have changed in the past 120 years.
Historians and genealogists searching for historical records can often be challenged by geographical changes over time. As county and state borders have shifted throughout US history, locating physical records can be tricky. Over ten years ago, The Newberry Library created a digital atlas of every historical county, state, and territorial boundary in US history, dating to the first colonies. The data was served via an Esri ArcGIS viewer application which made it difficult for non-geographers to use effectively and required expensive in-house server resources.
You can create simple online maps using free tools like Google's My Maps, but for serious collections of local landmarks, or historical/cultural resources, you'll need something more powerful, such as the custom platform that we built for Chicago Ancestors. I recently came across the open source platform "Arches," popularized by a digital history project in Los Angeles, that provides powerful geodata management capabilities perfect for digital humanities projects.
ChicagoAncestors.org is an online map allowing users to find and share historical Chicago resources in their own neighborhood or their own family history.
Over the past several years, we’ve witnessed a virtual explosion of geospatial software, services, and tools—that is, software and tools that enable us to easily map people, places, things, and data. Libraries are uniquely poised to take advantage of these new tools to improve operations and decision-making and to engage their patron communities. These software tools are frequently referred to as geographic information systems, or “GIS.”
GIS can be (incredibly) oversimplified to the concept of “digital maps.” Humans have been using maps for thousands of years—we’re “location-aware,” to borrow a phrase from the software industry. Maps are a way to visualize data, much like pie charts or bar graphs—but in the case of maps, we’re visualizing the physical world around us. And even as libraries deliver more services virtually, they remain physical centers of the neighborhoods and cities they serve. And spatial data can help us learn more about the neighborhoods and cities where our libraries are anchored.