Visualizing the Past

University of Richmond has invited an extraordinary group of researchers and practitioners to brainstorm on the most likely path history related visualization will take in the future.

The main goal is to map the road that will lead to the next platform of spatially references tools and services for the humanities scholar. The specific goals stated on the workshop website are:

• How can we harness emerging cyberinfrastructure tools and interoperability standards to visualize, analyze, and better understand historical events and processes as they spread out across both time and space?
• How can user-friendly tools or web sites be created to allow scholars and researchers to animate spatial and temporal data housed on different systems across the Internet?

Guided by the workshop discussions, the project directors will experiment with creating prototypes of new tools for overcoming obstacles to data visualization work, and the final product of the project will be a white paper synthesizing the lessons learned. This paper will serve as the basis for a larger collaborative grant proposal aimed at building practical tools for enhancing the ability of scholars to use visualization research techniques.

The list of attendees includes:

Rafael Alvarado is the principle information architect for House Divided Project, a comprehensive archive of primary and secondary sources relating to the years leading up to the American Civil War.

Nathaniel Ayers is the Digital Scholarship Lab’s programmer analyst at the University of Richmond, serving as the head of the Lab’s historical visualization work on projects such as Voting America.

David J. Bodenhamer is professor of history and founding executive director of the Polis Center at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis. North America Religion Atlas

Peter Bol. China GIS Atlas

Jon Christensen is a Ph.D.candidate in the Department of History and an associate director of the Spatial History Project of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.  Web sites: http://stanford.edu/~jonallan/ and http://spatialhistory.stanford.edu.

Alan Craig has focused his career on the interface between humans and machines. Craig is co-author of the book Understanding Virtual Reality, published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishing, and author of the forthcoming book, Using Virtual Reality. He is currently the head of I-CHASS at University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.

Phillip C. Dibner is the Director of Research Programs for the OGC Interoperability Institute (OGCii), the research and educational affiliate of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).  Prior to his involvement with the OGC, he joined the Silicon Valley technology boom of the 1980s and ’90s, where he worked on operating systems and network protocols, while pursuing his interest in environmental and ecological data acquisition and analysis.

Max Edelson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His first book, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina, examines agriculture, economy, and environment in the making of the Carolina Lowcountry’s early plantation landscape. Author of Mapping Colonial America.

Bill Ferster is senior scientist at the University of Virginia with a joint appointment with the Center for Technology and Teacher Education at the Curry School and the Virginia Center for Digital History in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Charles van den Heuvel is senior researcher for the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he leads the research project “Paper and Virtual Cities. New methodologies for the use of historical sources in virtual urban cartography.”

Matthew Koeppe is Director of GIScience Programs at the Association of American Geographers, where he coordinates many of the AAG’s GIS-related activities in the areas of education, outreach, international programs, and public policy.

Mano Marks is a Developer Advocate with Google, helping people place their content in Google Earth and Maps. He has a Masters in History from Columbia and a Masters in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley. He is very interested in the intersection between data, visualization, and communication.

Worthy N. Martin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas-Austin in 1981. He then joined the University of Virginia in 1982 as a professor of Computer Science.

Sorin Matei. Visible Past.

Robert K. Nelson is the Digital Scholarship Lab’s associate director, overseeing historical visualization work on the History Engine and the Text-Mapping projects. A graduate of William and Mary’s American Studies Ph.D. program, Rob is a historian of nineteenth-century America.

Scott Nesbit is a Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Virginia.

J. B. Owens is Professor of History and Director of the Geographically-Integrated History Laboratory at Idaho State University. He currently serves as co-Project Leader of a multidisciplinary, multinational research project he created for the European Science Foundation’s EUROCORES (European Collaborative Research) Scheme’s program “The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading” (TECT).

Peter Pulsifer is a research associate at the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre, Department of Geography, Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Pulsifer’s research is focused on creating new knowledge, methods and tools in support of integrating geographic data, information and knowledge for education and decision support. See Nunaliit

Carsten Roensdorf is an expert geographic data management and currently holds the position of Corporate Data Manager at Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s National Mapping Agency. In this role he is responsible for the integrity of the National Geographic Database, the repository for consistent, high detailed geographic base data in Great Britain.

Kurt Rohloff is a Scientist in its Information and Knowledge Technologies department at BBN Technologies, where his areas of technical expertise include computational modeling, control and decision systems, distributed resource management, and software reliability.

Erik Steiner is a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where he is the director of the Spatial History Lab. A recognized leader in the design of dynamic mapping applications, he has most notably led the development of the Atlas of Oregon CD-ROM and the Interactive Nolli and Vasi Websites of Rome.

Christopher Tucker recently stepped down as Senior Vice President for the Americas and National Programs at ERDAS, a leading technology provider for geospatial exploitation, analysis, data management/dissemination, information sharing and collaboration across the defense, intelligence, civilian federal, state/local, and commercial sectors – worldwide. Tucker is on the Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium (www.opengeospatial.org).

Josh Wall is a managing consultant for Information Strategies (www.infostrat.com) a Washington DC based Microsoft Gold Partner. Information Strategies was chosen by Microsoft to be one of a select group of partners to build solutions for Microsoft Surface, their innovative new multi-touch device.

Chris Weaver is Associate Director of the Center for Spatial Analysis and Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma.  He was recently a Research Associate with the GeoVISTA Center in the Department of Geography at Penn State, where he was also a founding member and core investigator with the North-East Visualization and Analytics Center.

Hadley Wickham is an assistant professor of Statistics at Rice University. He is interested the use of graphics to reveal interesting and unexpected features of data, as well as practical tools to make dealing with real-life data easier.

May Yuan is Brandt Professor, Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor and Associate Dean of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences and the director of Center for Spatial Analysis at the University of Oklahoma. May’s research interest is in temporal GIS, geographic representation, spatiotemporal information modeling, and applications of geographic information technologies to dynamic systems.

Jeanette Zerneke is the Technical Director for the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI). In that role Jeanette works with a diverse group of technology experts to develop tools and methodologies that support ECAI’s mission. Jeanette works directly with project teams to develop web sites and ePublications highlighting the growing use of new technologies to present cultural information in innovative ways.