Mapping for Humanities Researchers
By Fiona Tweedie
In case you thought it was all about the scientists over at the Research Bazaar, we’d like to reassure you that we’re thinking about the arts and social sciences as well.
Whether they’re tracking endangered languages, reconstructing trade routes or diving deep into a literary mystery, humanities researchers often need to customise maps to present the research findings. We’re offering two tools to researchers to help them with this challenge. The first, CartoDB, is an easy way of getting geocoded data onto a map. Once the basic data is loaded, CartoDB makes it simple to use size and colour to add nuance.
Archaeologists Emily Poelina-Hunter and Jarrad Paul learning CSS
Our first Carto DB workshop of 2014 was attended by postgraduate students from history, archaeology and linguistics. Archaeologist Josephine Verduci is in the final stages of her PhD thesis looking at cultural interaction in the eastern Mediterranean in the Early Iron Age. She has examined over 2,500 items of metal jewellery from 28 sites from around the Aegean, Cyprus, Israel and Jordan, looking for culturally specific motifs within ancient Philistia. Presenting her data visually on a series of customised maps makes it easier to see the patterns in her dataset.
Josephine and Steve at work on her map at the follow-up session
And if you need more control over your base map, we’ll be offering classes in TileMill as well. TileMill lets you decide what your underlying map should look like and add features such as roads and terrain. This can be important as many of the base maps offered by CartoDB include modern features that don’t belong on historical maps. Once you’ve perfected your base map, it’s straightforward to use CartoDB to overlay your data.
