This was an incredibly busy day–my head is still spinning! I am looking at my notes and see Lincoln’s warning: “Data mapping is hard.” He was NOT kidding! I had a rather hard time wrapping my mind around how to do this, and had some problems with the data set and the Google Fusion tables, although it worked eventually.  I don’t have the kind of research data for which this kind of mapping would be useful, but I could see uses for it with census data for a community project.

I liked StoryMap once I got it working and would like to play with it a bit more. I started a story about where I have lived, but only got one slide made. There was a Chautauqua County woman who served in the Civil War and I am thinking this could be a good little tool to tell her story–I will have to talk to our county historian about this. This seems also to be a good tool for students.

I had fun with the geo-rectifying tool, but I suspect it was a fairly easy assignment since my section of Boston still had mostly the same streets and landmarks. I think it would be more difficult for a city that had grown substantially between the 1930s and today  (Phoenix, for instance). The rectified maps reminded me of the way HistoryPin displays; I guess it is in some ways the same basic technique except you are pinning buildings and monuments to maps.

I got Geolocations uploaded to Omeka. I’m on a DH renga at Fredonia and we are thinking long term about a county history/landscape project. I was thinking that this might be a useful tool to start to play with and conceptualize such a project.

I’m looking forward to text mining, which seems (possibly) more relevant to my own research on gift giving.

Source: Spatial History & Mapping