In Feburary, over 100 people gathered at Busboys and Poets in DC’s U Street Neighborhood to witness the launch of MapStory Local – an initiative to empower community residents around the world to chronicle human settlement from the inside-out.

 

On Tuesday a smaller group of MapStorytellers gathered, this time at the African American Civil War Museum, to begin planning actual MapStory Local projects to pursue in the District.

 

 

The group represented a mix of teachers, local history buffs, geographers, and data wonks. Hari Jones, curator of the AACWM welcomed everyone and pitched his own MapStory project idea – to map the launch and spread of United States Colored Troop regiments during the U.S. Civil War. Hari has a first version of the story up and will be working with folks in the MapStory Volunteer Technical Community to build out his dataset.

Nitin Gadia, the Ames, Iowa resident who mapped the growth of his hometown from 1862 to present was also on hand to talk about his work and share lessons.

The group brainstormed datasets and maps that might be available for MapStories, story ideas to pursue, and people not in the room that need to be reached out to.

Here’s a few takeways:

Places to find old maps for MapStories:

• Capital Building Museum
• Library of Congress
• USGS Earth Explorer
• USGS Historic Topos (GeoPDF)
• US Coast & Geodetic Survey

Places to find data for MapStories:

• National Capital Planning Commission – NCPC
• DC Alley Inventory
• OCTO GIS
• City of Rockville
• Department of Natural Resources

MapStories to Tell:

• A changing U Street/14th Street coordinator
• Spread of the Smithsonian Institutions
• A complete infrastructure history of DC from swamp to present
• A focused look at DC demographic and housing stock shifts from 2001-2013

Clearly there is a lot more out there, but this is a start! If you live in the DC area and want to get involved with MapStory Local projects, register an account on MapStory.org and join the MeetUp at meetup.com/mapstorydc. The next gathering is TBD but likely in late June.

 

 

 

 

MapStory will host interns in Washington DC this summer. We’re looking for college students and recent graduates from all majors and backgrounds willing to work in a start-up environment. Send a brief cover letter and resume to info@mapstory.org by May 1!

 

Today we launched our inaugural class of MapStory Teaching Fellows. These eight amazing educators from across the United States will help co-design the future of the MapStory.org platform as they develop and implement innovative classroom-based MapStorytelling projects.

We launched the Fellows program based on our belief that new ideas in education are often developed separately from educators themselves, treating them as customers rather than experts. Instead, were getting educators involved at the front-end, while MapStory is still very much a work in progress, to follow their lead where we can.

Teaching Fellows’ projects span K-12 grade levels and emphasize students’ content knowledge in history, social studies, science and English/language arts, as well as their ability to conduct research, communicate, collaborate, and be creative.

In every case, what these teachers seek to do with their projects goes well beyond what MapStory.org can do…currently. So, we’re excited to see what they pull off and learn from the new ideas they surface.

Here’s a run-down of the types of projects they’ll be pursuing:

• Ellen Cantrell, a founding teacher of the Voice elementary charter school in New York City, will incorporate MapStorytelling into her efforts to help students develop a multi-layered perspective of US history since the Civil War.
• Steve Goldberg, founder of The Learning Center in Durham, North Carolina, will work with students, local history enthusiasts and MapStory to create a multimedia history of Durham that is refreshed annually by each new incoming class of students.
• Jessica Hanzlik, an 8th grade teacher at UNO Soccer Academy in Chicago, IL and a former Rhodes Scholar, will use MapStory to help her students understand the spatial and temporal dimensions of various civil rights movements in U.S. history.
• Kathryn Hayman, a Queen Anne’s County Technology Teacher of the Year and GIS consultant at Washington College in Maryland, will develop lessons with MapStory focused on the American Revolution.
• Jessica Marshall, a US History and Civics teacher at Alcott College Prep in Chicago, fluent in both Spanish and Portugese, will use her unique Action Civics course to engage students in locally focused MapStory project ideas based on issues they care about.
• Emily Mitarai, a Teach for America Corps member and second grade teacher at Abingdon Elementary School Arlington, Virginia, will see if MapStory can help her students make comparisons between ancient civilizations in Egypt and China and, perhaps, even task them with constructing MapStories about the cultural heritage of their own families.
• Thomas Neville, a history teacher at the Flint Hill School in Oakton, Virginia, will incorporate MapStory and the rich collections of the Historical Society of Washington to help his students trace the genesis and evolution of alley life in Washington DC.
• Jan Patton, an information technology specialist and librarian at the Flint Hill School in Virginia, will work with students to retrace the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, starting in Walden and Concord, traveling to the Abbe Museum, Penobscot Tribe and a 4 day canoe trip on the Thoreau/Wabanaki Trail.
• Sarah Radice, a 4th grade teacher at Abingdon Elementary in Virginia, will immerse her students into the Civil War and Reconstruction period and experiment with MapStories about slavery in Virginia, the rise of industrialization and the growth of cities, as well as westward migration.

To read a brief description of each Fellow, visit: http://www.scribd.com/doc/134778069/2013-Map-Story-Teaching-Fellows

To access a Press Release about the program, visit: http://wiki.mapstory.org/index.php?title=MapStory_announces_2013_Teaching_Fellows

This week we added an ability for users to share ‘Reflections’ on their MapStory projects, linked to at http://mapstory.org/mapstory/reflections/.

We imagine this as a space where MapStorytellers can share with others how they come up with project ideas, where they find data, the challenges they encounter, the choices they make, and more. Reflections, in other words, are about sharing the story behind the story.

Here we demonstrate one rough example, completed by Nitin Gadia. The video discusses Nitin’s process for producing the Ames, Iowa MapStory. Nitin is currently working on a more comprehensive Reflection that will include input from the various stakeholders in Ames he worked with.

To have a Reflection posted on MapStory, simply film it, post it to YouTube, and email us at mapstories@mapstory.org. We’ll give it a look and consider posting it. We’re especially interested in Reflections that discuss MapStory projects others might easily replicate (like a college campus, for example), or those that highlight cool collaborations formed through MapStory work (like a MapStory Local project, for example).

We’re also interested in your ideas about how to improve this Reflections space. What types of media besides videos should we offer? What tutorials and guidance can we create to support MapStorytellers creating Reflections? What are examples from across the web where this is done well? Email us your thoughts at mapstories@mapstory.org.

By Everett Lasher

This guide will help you construct your own MapStory Campus project. For an example, see my MapStory on Dickinson College campus here. This guide is meant for individuals who have at least an introductory knowledge of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and shapefile management. If you have little to no experience navigating GIS programs, you should review some of the basics at any of these following sites (depending on your preferred platform).

For ArcGIS users

For QGIS users

For OpenGeo users

Let’s get started: Obtain your data! 

The complexity of your story is completely up to you, but a good starting point is tracking down some geometry (shapefiles) for your campus. The MapStory Campus projects to date have largely focused on the expanding footprint of college buildings over time, but you can add whatever you want/find. If you’ve spent any time searching for data before, you will know that this can be the tricky part. Where are you going to get shapefiles of your campus? A good place to start is with your college/university archivist, planner, architect or facilities manager. Most institutions already have all the data you’ll ever need in at least some format. On occasion, your school might have a common GIS library, and more often than not, there is plenty of data ready for the taking. If none of these are an option, there are some alternatives to get the data you’ll need to proceed. For example, OpenStreetMap is an incredible resource, and several data extractors have been developed to pull and create shapefiles. See the OpenStreetMap wiki page here. If you have some experience with creating your own shapefiles, you can digitize new features from a satellite image or from a georeferenced map of your campus. Digitizing in ArcGIS, Digitizing in QGIS, Digitizing in OpenGeo

Compile the temporal component!

If you’re familiar with MapStory, you know that time is a key component to make your story work. When building the MapStory Campus project, adding the time to your data is often the best part. Depending on the quality and source of your data, you may already have dates for your data. If you’re working with building footprint shapefiles, each feature (building) will need to have a date associated with it. This could be construction date, dedication, opening, whatever. It is a good idea to be consistent with whatever you choose and be sure to document what the date represents when you publish. If your data does not have the time component, you will need to track this information down. Again, the university archivist, planner etc. is a good place to go. Finding construction dates and the like can be a very interesting glimpse into the history of your institution, and like any historical research project multiple sources are likely to be involved.

You can be as specific as you like on the date associated with your features. Year, month, day, minutes if you so desire. If you have questions about what format your dates need to be in, please consult the time manual here. Once you’ve found sources for your dates, its time to edit the data in a GIS program.

Edit the data!

Load your data into a GIS program. If your data doesn’t have a time attribute yet, you will need to start an editing session and create a new column to add your dates to. ArcGIS Attribute Help, QGIS Attribute Help, OpenGeo Attribute Help

In the example above, I’ve only entered a year for the date, but again, you may want to be more specific. To have your data work in MapStory, all the features must have a valid date, that is, you cannot leave any rows blank. Feel free to add any other attributes you want at this point too, i.e. building names, departments, construction material. Be sure to save your edits! Also, if you want to be able to classify your features by date when you style the data on the site, you will need to create a duplicate date column (this will make more sense later). The reason for this is that when you upload data to MapStory, the site will convert the date column you pick into a new format that will be slightly different than what you entered yourself. If this is confusing, disregard and move along.

 

You may also choose to add end dates to your features, though this isn’t required to make your story work. For example, you might have a date for a building that was demolished at one point. If you choose to add end dates to your data, just as with the date column, all features must have a valid entry. One simple fix for features that haven’t been demolished it to enter a date some time in the future.

Load your data!

Now for the fun part. Once you’ve logged in to the MapStory site, go to the upload storylayers page. There are number of useful video tutorials and explanations on the MapStory site for how to upload data. You will need the .shp, .shx, .prj and .dbf components of the shapefile to continue. If you entered the date attributes correctly while editing your data, you should be able to choose that column when uploading. If everything loads correctly, you should be taken to the storylayer page. Here you should take a moment to enter in the appropriate metadata.

Create a MapStory!

A MapStory is more than just loading a shapefile, its about creating a narrative to go along with your data. While you may just have data about the buildings that make up your institution, bricks and mortar are merely one aspect that you will want to share. You will want to add information about important historical events associated with your school, presidents, athletic titles, riots, landmark graduates, etc. At the simplest level, you will want to take the raw data you’ve just uploaded, and make it look good! To do this, you need to create a MapStory.

Styling

One of the first steps will often be “styling” your MapStory, that is, taking the raw storylayer and applying a distinctive and descriptive look and feel. Again, if you are familiar with symbology in ArcGIS, QGIS or OpenGeo, you will know that you can pick various attributes associated with your data and classify different colors or styles. I mentioned earlier that you might want to classify by date, that is break down the color scheme by year, decade, century etc.

If you haven’t practiced with styling on MapStory before, I suggest watching the styling-how-to video available here. Depending on if you added an end date or not, you will want to switch the playback on your story to cummulative. This is done by selecting the   button and selecting your desired playback.

Let’s assume that you want to style your story by classifying the year the buildings were built, help the viewers see patterns in the evolution of the campus footprint. We click the  button and we’re off.

I already duplicated the “date” field with “Date_Built” behind the scenes, and am now using this field to classify my colors. What this image above shows is that whenever the “Date_Built” field is less than or equal to 1800, the style of that feature is going to be a bright pink outline of the building. You can add as many Rules as you like to classify your features, build choropleths and vary shapes and outlines. It will take some time to get used to styling, but stick with it. Once you’ve finished styling, save your map and give it a nice abstract. You will want to edit the map metadata just as you did your storylayer metadata. If you’re satisfied, you will want to publish, that is allow others in the MapStory community to see your work. This is done under the info tab where you edit the metadata.

Annotations 

Once you have saved your map, you have the option to add annotations. Creating the narrative to go with your story is just as if not more important than styling. By using the notes feature, you can add important milestones and events to the timeline. You may wish to review the annotations video here. These annotations will appear in the timeline, and if you choose also as pop up bubbles on your map that will appear and disappear as your story plays. Viewers can hit play and watch the story progress naturally, or can use the timeline slider to move to certain points in time on your story.

Sit back and enjoy the show!

That’s it! You’ve just created a MapStory Campus project. Share it with the MapStory community, tell your friends, and of course, Happy MapStoryTelling!

 

MapStory Founder, Dr. Christopher Tucker, presented as a finalist at the SXSW LaunchEDU competition last week in Austin, TX. We received lots of great feedback and were excited to be a part of such an exciting group of projects. Congrats to winners Clever and SpeakingPal! See the full list of finalists here.

Continue reading →

By Nitin Gadia

 

This week I presented MapStory Local, an effort to mapstory all of human existence. Yes, that’s right – just like google maps or openstreetmap is mapping the human world across space, MapStory Local is doing the same, for all of time. We have demonstrated MapStory Local with Ames, Iowa, the town I live in, that includes all the buildings, properties, roads, railroads, boundaries, and more, from the time it was founded in 1863. I have refined the process such that this can be done in a day’s work once you have the data, and I’ve documented how to obtain the data, generate a mapstory, and refine it.

I obtained the data from the Ames city government, which sent me the data in an email – likewise, across the United States and other countries where local governments use geographic software, MapStory Locals can obtain the data in a bottom-up effort and together combine it all into a global mapstory. I believe that we can create a mapstory of all of what currently exists in the United States within a couple years. Once we have versioned editing and a map warper available in the coming months, all of the basic tools will be available through which storytellers can work with each other within mapstory, and start using it as a backdrop, or a “base mapstory” of sorts. MapStory Local may in the coming years drive a common mapstory of our shared history and from any number of perspectives, creating a deep memory that we all share as time moves forward.

> To view the Ames mapstory, click here:
http://mapstory.org/maps/475/view

> We have created written documentation, and video overviews are on their way.

> For more on my efforts, here is a page on my personal site:
http://www.thenittygritty.org/mapstorylocal

 

Contact Nitin at nittyjee@gmail.com to discuss his work further.

 

Viewing Alexandria, VA from the eyes of George Washington is no longer an impossible thought because of MapStory. Sean Emerson, a first-year student at Washington College is currently gathering historic maps and aerial photographs from George Washington’s time to the present, and utilizing various GIS technology skills in order to create a time lapse map of the city of Alexandria.

This project is a step-by-step process that involves collecting data from various sources including, The Library of Congress, U.S. Geological Survey, and commercial websites. The process to create the georeferenced images begins with downloading the image(s) from the source website and giving the image a spatial reference for viewing in ArcMap.  Next the image is opened in ArcMap and georeferenced with ArcGIS tools over a parcel layer. The image is then cropped and edited to a reasonable file size and then saved in a defined geographic projection. Once all this is complete the image will have gone from a simple scanned picture to an accurate, spatially referenced map that can be viewed and explored. “So far I have georeferenced over a dozen maps and historic aerial images with dozens more to go,” said Sean Emerson.

While the process seems to be clear cut, each map and image presents its own challenge. Some historic maps are easy to georeference because of the grid-like nature of Old Town Alexandria’s streets. Meanwhile others are more difficult, such as maps that show a larger area or aerial images with no labels at all. The aerials present a unique challenge when georeferencing because there is no street label. Therefore, these can only be georefernced by geographic features alone.

“I have found that the easiest way to do this is to look for unique geographic features such as cemeteries, diagonal intersections, bridges, and even certain large buildings that stand out on an aerial image,” says Emerson. “I have also found that shorelines and railroad tracks are not useful in georeferencing because rivers and creeks around the city have changed drastically over the years due to erosion and sedimentation and many rail yards in, and around, Alexandria have been torn up and replaced with high rise condominiums and other developments.”

The enormous changes in Alexandria are very evident in these maps. For example, parts of the city are identified as “Alexandria, D.C.” on many older maps because the city was once part of the District of Columbia. The aerial images from the 1940s-1960s, when compared to current images, show how much development has occurred in the city. Many images show the Capital Beltway under construction along Cameron Run, and much of the interstate is built on reclaimed land that used to be part of the creek. Comparing images of the beltway reveals how the road has been supersized to meet traffic demands as a result of the development in the area, going from a six lane highway with basic interchanges in 1964, to a 14 lane highway with spaghetti looking interchanges at every exit in 2012.

“It is fascinating to see the city change and grow over time,” said Emerson. “Working on this project has taught me a lot about the history of Alexandria, from its beginnings as an industrial port city, to a fairly wealthy city and suburb adjacent to Washington, D.C. I hope that this project shows people that each community has a rich history, which often goes untold and unnoticed. This project has taught me that a unique way to tell these stories is through old maps and aerial photos, which can best show the widespread change that occurs when a city grows. The story of Alexandria’s history is just one of thousands that can, and should be told for the benefit of future generations.”

What MapStories could we tell in recognition of Women’s History Month this March?

The map below indicates Women’s Suffrage laws in US states before passage of the 19th Amendment. It first appeared in September, 1920, in an article by Marjorie Shuler called “Out of Subjection Into Freedom,” published in the The Woman Citizen.

A few MapStorytellers repurposed it into this MapStory. Although very simple, it at least provides a picture of state progression on suffrage prior to the 19th Amendment’s passage in 1920. In the frame below, you can see the clear west-to-east trend line that occurred, and the early action in Illinois, for example. Click here to watch the full MapStory play.

What other stories about women’s social, political, and economic participation are waiting to be told in the context of place and time? Add your ideas at ‘Feedback’ on mapstory.org. Or just get to work…