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What I Learned Creating a Geospatial Platform
During my 9-month Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard, I built – as a side project – an online platform for tracking forest …
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Dive into the Putumayo World Music Archive
Follow a research project from a music industry database to a global map. See how data cleaning and GIS reveal the hidden geography of the Putumayo World Music collection.
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Vectorizing Historic Maps for Spatial Analysis
This guide demonstrates a method for transforming old maps into new, analyzable digital map data. It shows how an undergraduate used this process to study changes in Harvard's campus over time, particularly land development and ownership. The guide highlights the use of the Harvard Map Collection's resources and expertise in facilitating student research.
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Faces Behind the Data: Anna He
Get to know the newest member of the Harvard Map Collection, Anna He, in a discussion about the future of the Harvard Geospatial Library.
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Mapping Land Use Change in the Sacramento River Delta
Early one August morning, I found myself donning borrowed fishing waders on the banks of a restored tidal wetland in Northern California. Thanks to a …
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The Institute of Geographical Exploration at Harvard (1930–1951)
This dataset and story open the past of Harvard University’s Institute of Geographical Exploration (HUIGE, 1930-1951). The HUIGE was a building, a …
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HUIGE Archives Factsheets
Materials related to Ana Luiza Nicolae's 2024 Pforzheimer fellowship.
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Off the Beaten Path?
When I first arrived in Boston three years ago, only a few weeks away from starting college in the heart of Cambridge, I wanted to take in as much of …
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Mapping Black Cambridge
Quote, 'In August 1790, the United States of America conducted its first federal census. The data collected was minimal; census takers recorded no addresses, no professions, and no names except for head of household. Household members were tallied in demographic categories race, and—for white people only—gender and age...'
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Undoing Empire, One Plant at a Time
Quote, 'If a book needs great footnotes, a dataset needs great metadata. Most researchers will tell you that composing either one is anticlimactic at best and tedious at worst. But what if we... found a way to streamline the production of metadata? ...What if we built real — possibly entertaining — human conversation into the process?' Read about the Harvard Map Collection's 2023 partnership with Dr. Kelly O'Neill.
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Publishing Tips from a Data Safety Expert
Quote, 'To me, by having a data safety process, we’re facilitating open science, the ability to push boundaries and do research we weren’t able to do before by setting up these relationships that ensure that we’re respecting privacy, confidentiality, intellectual property from the data provider. We’re able to move forward with the research... How do we then balance that with open science?' In this article Harvard Map Collection GIS Librarian Belle Lipton interviews Harvard Kennedy School Data Safety Librarian Megan Potterbusch.
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Mapping the Russian Language
Quote, 'Don’t be afraid of going outside of your comfort zone or doing something no one else has done before!' In this article, Paige Lee shares how she sourced and wrangled data for her D3.js mapping project, and tips for other students getting started.
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Mapping Historic Black Life on Boston's Beacon Hill
Digital humanities and GIS project to facilitate discovery of resources depicting Black history in 18th and 19th century Boston.
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City Fictions
This semester, we worked with Tara K. Menon’s English class, titled City Fictions. In this class, undergraduates explored the various ways …
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Interview with Graphics Journalist Rachael Dottle
Skills to create beautiful and engaging maps can be strengthened in a semester, says Bloomberg graphics journalist. The type of narrative, map-based …