1 The Shaping the West project defines the "American West" as anything west of the Mississippi River.
2 Richard White defines "movement" as the key defining difference between spatial history and other forms of history. Richard White, "What is Spatial History?," The Spatial History Project February 2010, http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/../publications/pub29.html (accessed September 25, 2010), paragraph 8.
3 It must be noted that the first set of professionally-surveyed quads includes maps up to 1915. As such, we have many maps that were surveyed after 1900. As a rule, we always traced rail line from the oldest quad available.
4 Quads come in a variety of sizes, as small as 7.5' and as large as 60'. Some smaller quads are also layered on top of larger quads from earlier surveys.
5 Georeferencing in ArcGIS places the maps into their digital geographic locations. This process is essentially the same as a Google Maps team placing street-view photos into their digital geographic locations according to building and street coordinates.
6 White, "What is Spatial History?," paragraphs 26, 29.
7 This statement and the statement preceding it are better explained in Richard White's forthcoming book, Railroaded, from W. W. Norton and Co.
8 The freight table values for various stations were connected to the rail network through the attribute value of the station name in ArcGIS. The rail network with all of the included freight data was then exported into Flash.
9 White, "What is Spatial History?," paragraph 3.
References
White, Richard. "What is Spatial History?" The Spatial History Project February 2010. http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/../publications/pub29.html (accessed September 25, 2010).
Author Information Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to Evgenia Shnayder eshnayder@stanfordalumni.org.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank Killeen Hanson and Mithu Datta for their contributions to the earlier versions of this publication. I also owe thanks to Richard White, Kathy Harris, and Jess Peterson for editing various drafts. In addition, Kathy Harris was instrumental in preparing the final images and visualizations for publication.
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