Mapathons Receives 4-VA Grant

We are pleased to announce that as of May 2024, the Mapathons project has received support from GMU and Virginia Tech in the form of the 4-VA Grant and Complementary Funding.

We aim to bring Virginia researchers and students together for historical GIS training as a part of social “Mapathon”  events. Training students and researchers in historical GIS in a traditional classroom setting presents a number of challenges including the need to balance content and technical skills in a manner which privileges the former and detracts from the latter. This project aims to fill several critical needs: 1) Historical GIS training for research 2) Open-access educational resources for teaching GIS 3) a resource for the use of students and researchers. The Mapathon will focus on early modern maps to build upon the expertise of the researchers and their resources from their complementary digital humanities research projects.

Our proposal for a team-based event structure encourages mutual mentorship and meaningful reflection within and across teams at GMU and Virginia Tech. We build upon the successful event-based crowd-sourcing models utilized by Wikipedia edit-a-thons and adopted by early modern projects, such as Early Modern Recipes Online Transcribathons and the La Sfera Challenge. While we will recruit “core teams” of committed participants, the events will be open to all institutional affiliates to receive basic training and dive into visually engaging primary sources. 

In sum, this project aims to:

• Collect a bibliography of historical maps based on well-digitized cartographic collections for the seventeenth-century
• Create a framework for data sharing and collaboration among Universities and projects on historical GIS
• Host two “Mapathon” events providing students and other researchers at GMU and Virginia Tech with basic training in the geo reconciliation of historical maps and the creation of map layers in GIS
• Publish historical GIS layers for seventeenth-century Venice, London, and Virginia on ArcGIS online under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licensing.

Stay tuned for coming events!