American Panorama: An Atlas of United States History

Justin Madron

jmadron@richmond.edu

University of Richmond, United States of America

Nathaniel Ayers

nayers@richmond.edu

University of Richmond, United States of America

Introduction

The poster will focus on the Panorama Toolkit built

by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond (DSLUR) and Stamen
Design. The first section will outline the capabilities of the toolkit then
turn to examples from DSLUR's American Panorama project.

The focus of the toolkit is on the richly dynamic capabilities of modern web
maps to enable deep digital scholarship on American History. The components
are built on the foundation of open source tools including React and Leaflet
libraries -- creating an extensible, public, collaborative framework that will
support the continued development of future maps in our Atlas or the user's
maps of choice. The components within can be installed via npm and integrated
into any web-facing project. American Panorama also includes a template that
can be used as a starting point for maps in the American Panorama Atlas, or for
other projects that aim to use Panorama components. All of the components are
"views" (meaning they appear in the DOM) and use React.

Since it is open-source, people can contribute and add new components that can
be used individually, or wired together to create dynamic visualizations.
The flexibility of the toolkit allows for a range of complexity, which has been
seen in the five maps currently available. We envision this being used not only
in academia, but in other projects varying in subject and purpose.

To highlight the possibilities of the toolkit, we will focus on University of
Richmond's American Panorama, a series of online maps that use interactive
mapping features and innovative cartographic design to encourage active
investigation of American History. For over a year, the DSLUR has been working
with Stamen Design to investigate spatial exploration across various subjects
in 19th and 20th century U.S. history. These maps—which make up the Atlas—cover
a wide range of topics designed to communicate knowledge about some facet of
American history to audiences that include students, scholars, and the general
public.

In 2015, Stamen and the DSLUR collaborated on the first four maps of the Atlas.
The first map covers the forced migration of enslaved people before the
Civil War, highlighting the change in net importation and exportation of slaves
to and from different parts of the South for each decade between 1810-1860. The
migration across the Overland Trails to the West focuses on the routes
emigrants took envisioned through the writings in their journals, along with
the locations of forts, ferries, and bridges. The movement of people and goods
through canals highlights not only the location of canals, but visualizes the
goods that moved along them. The immigration of people to the U.S. from 1850 to
today shows Foreign-Born populations at various scales from country level to
county level.

The collaboration between Stamen and DSLUR was the key driver to the success of
the first four maps. We combined the knowledge and narrative ideas of DSLUR and
the visualization skills of Stamen to translate new knowledge into inviting,
elegant displays that respect the complexity of the subjects. American Panorama
combined two deeply passionate teams to create not just four deeply engaging
maps, but also a toolkit of reusable visualization components that could be
used for future atlases in the American Panorama.

In 2016, DSLUR employed the Panorama toolkit to build the fifth map in the
American Panorama series, a visualization of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation 
(HOLC) redlining maps from the early 20th Century. Using the visualization
tools developed by Stamen, DSLUR created Mapping Inequality, which updates
the study of New Deal America, the federal government, housing, and inequality
with twenty-first century tools and scholarship. It offers unprecedented online
access to the United States government's collection of "security maps" and area
descriptions produced between 1935 and 1940. The toolkit allowed the use of
cartographic visualizations like concentric circles, which arguably were the
spatial episteme of cities for early twentieth-century Americans. These
Concentric circle diagrams visualize the relative distribution of HOLC grades
in relation to the center of the city.

The toolkit's capabilities are seen in the fifth Atlas map, Mapping Inequality.
The foundational components, as well as the flexibility of the software,
allowed DSLUR to create an engaging, invoking map highlighting the practice of
denying access to mortgages and other forms of credit to neighborhoods based
upon discriminatory practices, which later became known as redlining. This last
installment of the Atlas showcased that this can be used by anyone wanting to
create a project using the capabilities of modern web mapping seen in American
Panorama.

Screenshots

[253-1]

American Panorama

[253-2][253-3]

Canals

[253-4]

Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America