D igital maps saturate our lives, from the talking atlases in our pockets to the space-eye view of our streets on Google Earth.
Edward L. Ayers, a historian at the University of Richmond, thinks maps can do something more: invigorate the humanities.
By illustrating the big patterns of social change, he says, new online tools can advance scholarship and connect history to a broad public.
That’s the goal of “American Panorama,” a historical atlas that has rocketed across the web since Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab released it last year. The free online atlas maps major social developments like the forced migration of slaves before the Civil War and patterns of immigration to the United States from 1850 to 2010. It is edited by Mr. Ayers and Robert K. Nelson, director of the lab.
Most maps in atlases or textbooks are illustrative. They show you a pattern already known to exist. But the maps in American Panorama are exploratory. Like digital archives, they don’t tell users what to think. They invite people to ask questions.
For example: How did the slave trade fluctuate over time? Scholars have tended to think of Virginia as an exporter of slaves to other states, Mr. Ayers says. But click to the 1860 section of the “Forced Migration of Enslaved People” map, and you can watch mountainous parts of the state begin to import slaves on the eve of the Civil War.
“The slave trade is this pulsing, living, cancerous growth that is constantly changing its shape in response to the market,” says Mr. Ayers, 63, who is a historian of the South and a former president of the university. “To be able to see that playing out is something we’ve never been able to do before.”
American Panorama culminates years of work that Mr. Ayers and his colleagues have done in this vein. In the early 1990s, he created an iconic digital-history project, The Valley of the Shadow, an online archive of records from two communities during the Civil War era. He led the establishment of Richmond’s digital lab after becoming the university’s president, in 2007.
Maps in American Panorama invite people to ask questions.
The lab has carved out a niche in the increasingly crowded world of digital humanities. Based at a liberal-arts university, it’s a small shop focused on American history, the specialty of both Mr. Ayers and Mr. Nelson, 42. The push to map history draws inspiration from the kinds of visualizations that Mr. Ayers had noticed in fields like physics and chemistry.
“I would look at these things, and I’d go, This is kind of what history looks like in my own head,” he says. “It’s not really a list of books and arguments. It’s in a geographic and chronological frame, unfolding.”
The first project to unfold from Richmond’s lab was Voting America, released during the 2008 election year. It charted the patterns of political history going back to the 1840s. Though the technology seems crude by today’s standards, the project made headlines at the time for its “Hollywood-inspired” animated maps that shed light on timely subjects such as how “battleground states” had changed over the years.
Then came Visualizing Emancipation. This map gave a spatial twist to a core subject of 19th-century American history: how four million slaves gained their freedom. It plotted the movements of the U.S. Army during the Civil War. It also mapped more than 3,000 episodes in which African-Americans struggled to become free.
The attempt to integrate different types of historical data may lead us to new conclusions.
American Panorama reimagines the historical atlas using digital tools. The project, built in collaboration with a firm called Stamen Design, is inspired by Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright’s 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States. That book gathered a range of materials critical to the professional historian: nearly 700 maps on borders, voting, religion, industry, agriculture, demography, and the military.
Susan Schulten, a University of Denver professor who studies the history of maps, calls American Panorama an exciting project. “The attempt to integrate different types of historical data,” she says, “may lead us to new conclusions.”
But Mr. Nelson and Mr. Ayers don’t want to reach only scholars. As co-editors of the atlas — Mr. Nelson handles day-to-day building and management, while Mr. Ayers is involved at the level of “broad vision” and fund raising — they believe American Panorama can reach a wide audience.
Judging by the early response, they’re right. The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate have featured it. Much of the news-media coverage has focused on the Foreign-Born Population map, which displays county-level data on the hot-button topic of immigration. In some ways, says Mr. Nelson, Donald J. Trump “created an interest in this map.”
One of the project’s next releases promises to be equally timely. It will focus on neighborhood redlining during the New Deal, a subject that is foundational to some of the current debates about race and inequality.
