CALIFORNIA DIGITAL MAPPING WORKSHOP

On October 23, 2009, the UC Humanities Research Institute hosted the California Digital Mapping Workshop at its new facilities in the Humanities Gateway building at UC Irvine. The workshop was designed to be the first in an ongoing series of conversations, both practical and theoretical, about cultural and cartographical mapping and the establishment of a west coast network of digitally engaged scholars who are using mapping technologies in innovative ways to further humanities research.

This first meeting brought together scholars across California for an exploratory, open-ended and multidisciplinary dialogue on digital mapping, its impact on and meaning for historical and geographical research, and the ways in which many current projects overlap and engage with each other. "California Digital Mapping" refers both to work being done in and about California (not necessarily on California).

Roster of Participants and Projects

Richard Marciano and Chien-Yi Hou University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Jesus Hernandez, UC Davis
Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California's Exclusionary Spaces

Jan Reiff, UCLA
Chicago and the Works Progress Administration
(Link forthcoming)

Todd Presner, UCLA
Hypercities

Chris Johanson, UCLA
The Geo-Temporal Roman Forum

Zoe Borovsky, UCLA
Encyclopedia of Egyptology

Maurizio Forte, University of California, Merced
Virtual Rome

Ruth Mostern, UC Merced
Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty

Rethinking Timelines: Silk Road Pilot Demo

Pat Seed, UC Irvine
Portuguese Mapping the African Coast

Coastal Flooding

Caren Kaplan, UC Davis
"Dead Reckoning: Aerial Perception and the Social Construction of Targets," Vectors 2:2 (Jan. 2007)

"Precision Targets," with Erik Loyer, a multimedia essay, forthcoming, Vectors, Spring 2010

Rosemarie McKeon, Indigenous Mapping Network
indigenousmapping.net
www.twitter.com/IndigMapNetwork

Affiliated Projects

Timothy Tangherlini, UCLA
Danish Folklore Data Nexus

Ibsen's Biographical Timeline

Icelandic Manuscripts

PORTUGUESE CARTOGRAPHY & COASTAL AFRICA

In collaboration with UC Irvine Professor of History Patricia Seed, UCHRI has won a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project, "The Development of Mapping: Portuguese Cartography and Coastal Africa," will create an interactive GIS (Geographic Information Systems) database of 15th-century Portuguese maps of the African coastline, in conjunction with place name, hydration, elevation, and other data.

Seed, the project director, discovered that these maps are the first that were drawn accurately to scale. This knowledge has been inaccessible in part because of the far-flung present-day location of the maps themselves. Simply amassing this collection of approximately 100 surviving nautical charts of Africa's coast circa 1434 to 1504 has taken Seed more than a decade, because they are dispersed in archives all over the western world.

Digital technology applied to this historically significant collection of maps will not only allow collective display, but will create a research resource enabling entirely new modes of scholarly investigation. GIS software applied to various data sets will allow researchers to identify features of the maps, learn about locations of 15^th-century Africans, and analyze advances in cartography. This technology will reveal new historical information about Africa’s coastal people prior to extended contact with Europeans, providing a baseline against which the subsequent impact of environmental change and the slave trade can be compared.

Guinea coast of Africa from Sierra Leon to Elmina (Ghana). Cantino Map of 1502, Biblioteca estense, Modena.

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