Speakers: Catherine Phipps (History) and Melanie Conroy (World Languages and Literatures)

Drs. Melanie Conroy and Catherine Phipps talk about maps and mapping in the digital humanities. Creating maps requires having a list of place names or addresses and then converting those places into coordinates. Automatic geocoders are software tools to map locations for data sets containing addresses. Dr Conroy talks about how to create a map using Palladio, a softare package by Stanford’s Humanities + Design Lab. Researchers can map data sets in different styles, i.e. terrain maps and street maps. Palladio yields a point map or a point-to-point map with two locations. Dr Phipps talks about using ArcGIS or other related software to create maps or archives with a map component. ArcGIS is software with which you can build data layers to analyze the relationships between the various data sets or layers. Another tool is Story Maps, which is easier to use and does not require you to have your own data set. Built on templates, it combines texts, multimedia, and pictures to create a storyline. If researching a particular city, Hyper Cities is a platform for collaborative projects built on layered data sets; current projects include public, external, and private collections.

Summary and video by Claire Yasmin Khokhar