Metapolis: Spatializing Histories through Archival Sources

FAIN: HAA-287761-22

President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)
Lukas Klic (Project Director: January 2022 to present)

The creation of geospatial enhancements to an existing digital infrastructure that will allow users to link to other scholarship, generate new research, and publish findings.

Metapolis aims to develop a digital research infrastructure to support scholarship in the humanities that seeks to geospatially reconstruct places throughout time. As an interactive map-based publication platform, it enables users to cross-pollinate archival, bibliographic and multimedia sources with interpretive research, allowing for their interlinking and visualization on a map. Built on top of ResearchSpace, an open-source Semantic Web research environment, it facilitates the reuse and publishing of Linked Open Data. A rich set of features support data enrichment with external knowledge bases such as VIAF, WikiData, OCLC, and the Getty vocabularies. Designed both as a research and publication tool, the software allows groups of scholars from a wide range of humanistic disciplines to connect their research and augment each other's findings through the layering of historical maps, interlinking them to sources to allow users to build knowledge about the world and its history.