MapScholar: A Web Tool for Publishing Interactive Cartographic Collections

FAIN: HK-50048-12

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)
Scott Max Edelson (Project Director: January 2012 to May 2017)
William Ferster (Co Project Director: January 2012 to May 2017)

The further development of MapScholar, an online interactive tool that allows humanities scholars and students to combine digitized maps from disparate humanities collections to generate dynamic visualizations for use in online scholarly publications.

MapScholar is an interactive visualization tool for historic map collections. It offers an open-source portal that gives individual scholars the independent means of gathering high-resolution images, analyzing them in rich geospatial contexts, and using them to illustrate new interpretations in the history of cartography and related humanities fields. It joins together data in industry-standard file formats with free and effective data-serving sites such as Flickr and Google Docs to display its on-the-fly visualizations. MapScholar enhances traditional books and articles by making it possible -- at no cost to publishers -- to mount stunning web displays of map collections assembled from libraries around the world. MapScholar’s key innovation is how it brings maps together -- regardless of the archive in which they sit -- for the purpose of generating new knowledge about human perceptions of geographic space.

Associated Products

MapScholar (Web Resource)
Title: MapScholar
Author: William Ferster
Author: S. Max Edelson
Abstract: MapScholar is a free, online platform for geospatial visualization. It enables humanities and social science scholars to create digital “atlases” featuring high-resolution images of historic mapsThis web application runs in any internet browser and requires no special software. MapScholar’s user-friendly interface manages geospatial data to make it easy to create and publish simple map collections quickly. MapScholar also supports more sophisticated projects, from data-driven research to the creation of curated exhibitions of cartographic collections. Its suite of tools for image processing, text and graphic annotation, and georeferencing help put maps in context. MapScholar is the place to create and share new visual interpretations of how people have experienced and represented geographic space in world history.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://mapscholar.org/

MapScholar: A New Digital Tool for Displaying Map Collections Online (Article)
Title: MapScholar: A New Digital Tool for Displaying Map Collections Online
Author: S. Max Edelson
Author: Shane Lin
Abstract: The article describes the origins and goals of the project and featured some of the revised demonstration sites listed under “featured atlases” at mapscholar.org
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.washmapsociety.org/TPJ2.htm
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Portolan: Journal of the Washington Map Society
Publisher: Washington Map Society

Visualizing the Southern Frontier: Cartography and Colonization in Eighteenth-Century Georgia (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Visualizing the Southern Frontier: Cartography and Colonization in Eighteenth-Century Georgia
Abstract: A MapScholar presentation on early mapping in the colony.
Author: S. Max Edelson
Date: 2/19/2016
Location: Ossabaw Island Foundation’s “Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture" conference, Savannah, Georgia

The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Book)
Title: The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence
Author: S. Max Edelson
Abstract: After the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, and across new islands in the West Indies. To better rule these vast dominions, Britain set out to map its new territories with unprecedented rigor and precision. Max Edelson’s The New Map of Empire pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the generation before the American Revolution. Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida’s rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the continental interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces—their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce—and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic. Britain’s vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the New World. As London’s mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented. Accompanying Edelson’s innovative spatial history of British America are online visualizations of more than 250 original maps, plans, and charts.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/new-map-of-empire-how-britain-imagined-america-before-independence/oclc/1004874236&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Secondary URL: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674972117
Secondary URL Description: Harvard University Press catalog entry
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780674972117
Copy sent to NEH?: No

MapScholar: A Web Tool for Publishing Interactive Cartographic Collections (Article)
Title: MapScholar: A Web Tool for Publishing Interactive Cartographic Collections
Author: S. Max Edelson
Author: Bill Ferster
Abstract: MapScholar is an open-source Web tool that encourages humanities researchers to gather, analyze, and share images of historical maps. It is designed to open access to map images, visualize maps as collections within rich geospatial contexts, and enhance traditional publishing by making it easy to produce interactive, high-resolution map displays. Despite its enormous potential, map history has always been limited by the challenges of reproducing dense images printed and drawn on fragile paper artifacts. MapScholar capitalizes on the increasing availability of digital images to foster breakthroughs in map analysis and interpretation. By enabling any scholar to create an interactive digital map collection that can be “published” to illustrate a book or article, this new digital humanities tool seeks to put maps at the center of the new spatial turn in the humanities.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/15420353.2012.747463
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Map & Geography Libraries: Advances in Geospatial Information, Collections & Archives
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

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