Stanford University
CESTA

This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy.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.
Quad Index

Authors: Killeen Hanson, Evgenia Shnayder, John Watson, and Richard White

This georeferenced shapefile reveals the extent of the historic USGS quads Shaping the West researchers have found for California, Nevada, and Utah (and also beginning to touch on Arizona, Wyoming, and Colorado in this latest version). The different colors represent the different scales of USGS quads. The largest rectangles are 60 minute quads and the smallest are 7.5 minute quads.

RELATED VISUALIZATIONS:
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Seeing Space in Terms of Track Length and Cost of Shipping
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Population Density in the United States from 1790 to 2000
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California Railroad Commission,
Station Construction Data, 1850-1900
The Expansion of the Western Railroad
The Expansion of the Western Railroad
Extent of Digitized Railroad
Extent of Digitized Railroad
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Railroad Repeats: The Alfred A. Hart Photo Project
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Per Capita Income in the United States: 1880-1910
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The Central Pacific and Transcontinental Eleven Step:
How to Run a Transcontinental Railroad
Examples of Digitizing Rail from Historic USGS Quads
Examples of Digitizing Rail from Historic USGS Quads
RELATED PUBLICATIONS:
A Data Model for Spatial History
A Data Model for Spatial History
Spatial History