This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy. The Spatial History Project was active at Stanford University from 2007-2022, engaging in dozens of collaborative projects led by faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, visiting scholars and others at Stanford and beyond. More than 150 undergraduate students from more than a dozen disciplines contributed to these projects. In addition to a robust intellectual exchange built through these partnerships, research outputs included major monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, museum exhibitions, digital articles, robust websites, and dozens of lightweight interactive visualizations, mostly developed with Adobe Flash (now defunct). While most of those publications live on in other forms, the content exclusive to this website is preserved in good faith through this static version of the site. Flash-based content is partially available in emulated form using the Ruffle emulator.
Projects and Collaborations (in rough chronological order)
This is a project about California and its history as told through modern photographs –largely contemporary landscape photographs by Jesse White.
The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project seeks to give a voice to the Chinese migrants whose labor on the Transcontinental Railroad helped to shape the physical and social landscape of the American West.
This research is intended to understand the transformation of ecosystems in Brazil by linking and spatially integrating data on ecosystem distribution and formation, with demographic, land use, and settlement history data on a regional scale.
George Moses Horton (1798-1883), the famous poet, entrepreneur, and slave, demonstrates that Hip Hop has a much longer history than Jay-Z. Horton allows us a glimpse into the ephemeral world of nineteenth century oral culture.
This project traces the history of urban planning in San Francisco, placing special emphasis on unrealized schemes. Rather than using visual material simply to illustrate outcomes, Imagined San Francisco uses historical plans, maps, architectural renderings, and photographs to show what might have been.
The project aims to create a digital map to visualize economic and political integration in Epirus (today in Western Greece and Southern Albania) within the Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Our research analyzes urban resilience and reconstruction at the margins of medium-sized cities over half of a century of armed conflict in Colombia.
This project uses geospatial and distant reading approaches to gain a more adequate understanding of early modern political geography, to retrace the ways in which goods and people travelled through the physical landscape, and to uncover broad spatial and temporal trends in intellectual history.
This project studies the 'Grand Tour of Italy’, which involved thousands of diverse northern Europeans, elites and otherwise, for whom the Italian journey was a transformative cultural and social experience, and which affected and shaped the history of Britain and Italy alike. We are working with the more than five thousand entries in John Ingamells’ Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers to Italy to create a dynamic searchable database, along with digital visualizations, of these travelers’ journeys and lives.
This project seeks to chart a geography of The Arctic Regions, an enormous 1873 book that represents the first photographic survey of Greenland’s western coast.
Over the past 3 decades, Gordon has studied the behavior, demography and
ecology of a population of about 300 harvester ant colonies in Arizona,
using both field and laboratory experiments.
This project will examine the late-twentieth-century history of illegal border crossing, Mexican migrant communities, and bi-national efforts to regulate the border.
Kindred Britain takes one of the oldest forms of social network
analysis, family relationships, and reimagines it for the contemporary
medium of the Web.
Using historical records of European banks, this project traces the
geographical evolution of the region’s sprawling network of stock
exchanges during the peak period of industrialization, 1860-1914.
Using GIS technology and accepted scholarly methods, this multi-disciplinary project intends to create a layered history of Rome by updating Forma Urbis Romae, the cartographic masterpiece of ancient Roman topography published in 1901 by archeologist Rodolfo Lanciani.
This research chronicles the roots of suburban expansion in San Antonio, Texas, one of the fastest growing cities in the United States.
We propose to compile a “Global Atlas of Oil” that will highlight the historic development of the petroleum industry and its consequences, addressing large-scale historical questions.
Using California dance pioneer Anna Halprin’s collection as source material, the project seeks to update the keeping of choreographic processes and access new layers of meaning, understanding and choreographic possibilities around the ideas of experience, environment and community.
In collaboration with the Bill Lane Center for the American West, the Cantor Arts Center, and the Stanford Geospatial Center, this project seeks to illustrate the importance of Carleton Watkins’ photography and situate his work in a broader historical and geographic context.
This project, funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, seeks to test ways in which humanities researchers might use different types of crowdsourcing and community sourcing to further research, and ask questions that would be difficult or impossible to do in more traditional modes of inquiry.
The project visualizes the history and geography of the fiscal relationship between western counties and states and the federal lands within their jurisdictions.
Not unlike its better known counterpart, the “one-child policy,” funeral reform (binzang gaige 殡葬改革) is a controversial governmental initiative crafted in response to China’s population crisis.
In collaboration with Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, Stanford Heritage Services, the Searsville Steering Committee and the broader community, this project reflects an ongoing academic engagement with the study of Stanford's ecological and historical context. The project's focus is the San Francisquito Creek watershed, home to the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, Stanford, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and East Palo Alto.
This project explores the construction of a bulk, global trade in British medicines during the long eighteenth century that connected South Asia, London, and the American colonies through the consumption of a particular kind of manufactured good.
This project investigates scholarly enterprises that sought contributions from the public in the nineteenth century.
Using present-day landscape photography, California's Silicon Valley is imagined as its own future wasteland, the former home, that is, of the technology industry. This is a creative, if dystopic look at what the region that makes tomorrow (e.g. Apple, Google, Oracle) will look like tomorrow.
"The Broken Paths of Freedom: Free Africans in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Slave Society" is a historical study of the geographies of enslavement, emancipation, and liberty traversed by Free Africans [Portuguese: africanos livres; also known as emancipados and "Liberated Africans"], a fascinating subgroup of the roughly three-quarter million enslaved Africans illicitly trafficked to the Brazilian empire between 1821 and 1856.
Aboriginal Fire and Desert Biodiversity is an interdisciplinary NSF-sponsored project examining how indigenous Martu from Western Australia use fire in the process of hunting and how this daily practice leads to greater biodiversity.
The Mapping Endangered Languages Project focuses on endangered languages
around the world and efforts to preserve and revitalize them.
What roles did animals play in nineteenth-century cities? What urban spaces did they inhabit and how did those spaces change over time? How, and in what ways, did cities become remade as human space?
The project brings together faculty and students from across a range of
disciplines and research centers to focus on the history and
significance of road transportation networks in patterning social and
political change in the United States and Brazil.
Based on some of the research on Rio previously done for CESTA’s
“Terrain of History” and “The Broken Paths of Freedom” projects, this
new project will rethink the ways in which digital scholarship is
produced and published.
Between the Tides aims to reveal, visualize, and analyze the changing relationship between society and nature on San Francisco Bay's dynamic tidal margin.
In Britain, America and parts of Europe, the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century witnessed the advent of the phenomenon we know today
as "spiritual but not religious".
This project investigates the spatial and environmental history of the establishment of the Iguazú National Park in Argentina and the Iguaçu National Park in Brazil.
Chile's Aquaculture Industry, 1950-2000 researches the connections among environmental and social change in the salmon-farming industry in southern Chile.
In this study of human rights education in Sweden and the US, funded by the Wallenberg foundation, digital tools are used to process and elucidate how history can be used, understood and written in different countries and school cultures.
The birth of the Americas was a time of discontent. This is expressed in
the disputes that shook the colonies. This project aims at creating a
model of spatial and semantic representation of rebellions and showing
that they are a potentially promising object for Spatial History.
"The Archaeology of Place in Ancient Cyprus" is
concerned with mapping sites whose contemporary names cannot be
known, and whose spatial configuration is often uncertain; or at
least only partially evident.
Chinese Canadian Stories: Uncommon Histories from a Common Past is a collaborative project developing a one-stop web portal dedicated to collecting, digital archiving, accessing, and distributing information about Chinese Canadian history.
Enchanting the Desert explicates the space produced by an early-twentieth-century photographic slideshow of the Grand Canyon made by journeyman photographer Henry Peabody. In this narrated series of 43 images viewers were virtually transported to locations around the Canyon through landscape views and oral descriptions, yet the geography of the Canyon that is portrayed remains obscured.
These trains made constant circuits through the country in the early
twentieth century, picking up and then ejecting so-called “undesirable
aliens” – non-citizens convicted of crimes, deemed mad or politically
radical, the very poor, or else those considered racially ineligible to
citizenship, many Chinese among them.
The Cigarette Citadels project explores visual and spatial questions around the six trillion cigarettes that are manufactured, packaged, and distributed by the tobacco industry every year.
Critical Habitat is investigating the relationship between people and the environment in the American West at different spatial and temporal scales.
Geography of the Post maps the late nineteenth-century U.S. postal network on its western periphery: where it spread, how it operated, and its role in shaping the space and place of the region.
Holocaust Geographies is a collaboration on an NSF-sponsored grant led by Anne Knowles (Middlebury College) and Alberto Giordano (Texas State University). Across five studies, the project examines spaces and places of the Holocaust.
This project traces linkages among the forerunners of child psychiatry from Vienna in the 1930s through the 1940s, outlining connections among the diaspora and those who stayed during the Third Reich.
The spatially-oriented analysis of the water distribution in 19th
combines data on the position of aqueducts, fountains, private taps, the
conduit system and the amount of water provided by each of these with
the data of the “Terrain of History" project.
The Memorial Mapping project "maps" 9/11 memorials built in countries other than the United States, providing a geographic database of their locations, styles, subjects, dedication histories, and audiences.
Innovative digital research technologies allow us to look at the expansion of the American nation during the critical years before the Civil War in new ways. During this time in history, law served in the process of empire.
Mapping Vice in Early Twentieth-Century Philadelphia uses maps to explore the distribution of prostitution "commutes" and arrests in Philadelphia in the nineteen teens.
The Great Migration was a watershed in African American life: over the course of six decades (1910-1970), six million black southerners left the South in search of more meaningful experiences of freedom. I hope to offer a different angle of vision on the migration by bringing to light the places where migrants slept, ate, got haircuts, and danced along the way.
The standard geopolitical model based on sovereign states provides an inadequate framework for mapping basic economic and social data. This projects re-maps the world around compact units of similar economic circumstances, all of which contain approximately 100,000,000 inhabitants.
Project Steel Beta is a web-based visualization tool for spatio-temporal data that allows users to visually display and explore GIS data from geodatabases within a browser.
Rebooting History is an exploration with a point of origin in how regional utilization of East Palo Alto's space helped set the stage for a dynamic of inequality between the community and what would become Silicon Valley.
In this era of change, understanding how past conservation efforts have either succeeded or failed is of utmost importance–only after such an assessment can we move forward and propose strategic conservation plans for the future.
This project explores the local social and
political effects
of higher education in West Africa, particularly history
education
"Richard Pryor's Peoria" aims to open up the work of a biography for the digital age. Traditionally, biographers have done their research–rooted around in archives, conducted their interviews, and so on–and then streamlined that research to write the story of the person in question.
Shaping the West explores the construction of space by transcontinental railroads in North America during the late nineteenth century.
Terrain of History, an international collaborative project, seeks to reconstruct and analyze the social, cultural, and economic spaces of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.
Tooling Up for Digital Histories is a collaboration between the Spatial History Project and the Computer Graphics Lab at Stanford University and others to compile and create new tools for digital and spatial research in the humanities.
Vulnerability-in-Production reconstructs how vulnerability to the 1991 Oakland Hills Fire developed over time, space and in the context of dynamic social-ecological change.
