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This article discusses an opportunity to engage in new forms of collaborative research made possible by widespread access to the web and mapping technologies. While throughout history there have been references of various types to locations on the earth, very little has been organized in a way to support even simple spatial search or visualization...
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... WorldMap is designed to be publicly accessible, simple to use for nontechnical scholars, fast in search and mapping, and rich in geographic content. It is being built by and hosted by the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University and is open to users around the world for both viewing and editing data (Lewis and Guan 2011). The platform is particularly useful for technology-challenged humanities scholars for it lowers the cost of entry to the spatial humanities. ...
A Historical Geographic Information System (HGIS) is a way to create a time-variable spatial representation of geographic features, which is considered as a bridging technology between geography and history in a digital framework. The history of Makkah (Mecca), Saudi Arabia covers several thousand years, with numerous sites representing important historical landmarks. As Makkah is the most important city in Islamic history, developing a HGIS for it would have significant meaning for the more than a billion Muslims around the world. A state-of-the-art HGIS has been developed for Makkah through acquiring, integrating, manipulating, and analyzing an extensive collection of spatial and non-spatial datasets. This research has resulted in the publishing of a bilingual atlas of historical sites in Makkah that contains more than seventy historical locations and covers almost a thousand years (500s to 1500s). Work is underway to also build an online HGIS on the Harvard WorldMap platform, so that materials in the atlas and beyond will be made available for researchers and the general public from any part of the world through a web-based dynamic mapping site. Future work may propel the system into an augmented reality innovation. This paper introduces the background and historical-geographic materials, summarizes the technical challenges and solutions, and presents milestones and perspectives for this ongoing effort.
Without a department of geography, Harvard University established the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) in 2006 to support research and teaching of all disciplines across the University with emerging geospatial technologies. In the past four and a half years, CGA built an institutional service infrastructure and unleashed an increasing demand on geographic analysis in many fields. CGA services range from helpdesk, project consultation, training, hardware/software administration, community building, to system development and methodology research. Services often start as an application of existing GIS technology, eventually contributing to the study of geographic information science in many ways. As a new generation of students and researchers growing up with Google Earth and the like, their demand for geospatial services will continue to push CGA into new territories.
Without a department of geography, Harvard University established the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) in 2006 to support research and teaching of all disciplines across the University with emerging geospatial technologies. In the past four and a half years, CGA built an institutional service infrastructure and unleashed an increasing demand on geographic analysis in many fields. CGA services range from helpdesk, project consultation, training, hardware/software administration, community building, to system development and methodology research. Services often start as an application of existing GIS technology, eventually contributing to the study of geographic information science in many ways. As a new generation of students and researchers growing up with Google Earth and the like, their demand for geospatial services will continue to push CGA into new territories.
WorldMap is an open source online mapping application which aims to lower barriers for scholars who wish to visualize, analyze, organize, present, and publish mapped information. In late 2013, 290 respondents among the 8,000 registered users participated in an online survey in which they described their activities, purposes, experiences, and preferences regarding the system. Participants also described their professional background, GIS skill level, age, gender, and country of work. This study analyzes the results of the survey, by summarizing the responses to each question independently and by examining the relationships and dependencies of these answers across the different questions to try to better understand why users responded the way they did. The study is based on the user-centered design (UCD) approach. We aim to use the survey results to improve our understanding of user demographics and needs. Findings from this study will be used to guide WorldMap improvements, and we hope the findings will also shed light on the broader requirements of online GIS users.
WorldMap is a web-based, map-centric data exploration system built on open-source geospatial technology at Harvard University. It is designed to serve collaborative research and teaching, but is also accessible to the general public. This article explains WorldMap's basic functions through several historical research projects, demonstrating its flexible scale (from neighborhood to continent) and diverse research themes (social, political, economic, cultural, infrastructural, etc.). Also shared in this article are our experiences in handling technical and institutional challenges during system development, such as synchronization of software components being developed by multiple organizations; juggling competing priorities for serving individual requests and developing a system that will enable users to support themselves; balancing promotion of the system usage with constraints on infrastructure investment; harnessing volunteered geographic information while managing data quality; as well as protecting copyrights, preserving permanent links and citations, and providing long-term archiving.
Founded in 1818, the Harvard Map Collection (HMC) is the oldest map collection in America, holding 400,000 maps, more than 6,000 atlases, and thousands of reference books. HMC has a strong commitment to digital resources, and it manages the Harvard Geospatial Library, a foundation for geospatial data service at Harvard. The Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) at Harvard University was founded in 2006, independent of the library system, to serve the entire university. This article presents the history, organizational structure, and operational model of CGA and HMC, reviews achievements, lessons learned, suggests future improvements, and reviews GIS-related medical research at Harvard.
The Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) at Harvard University supports research and teaching that relies on geographic information. This includes supporting geographic analysis for public health research at Harvard. This article reviews geographic concepts that apply to public health, pertinent data available in geographic format, and GIS analytical techniques. The work-flow methodology the CGA has developed for conducting research with geographic data will be presented, highlighting successful practices to follow and pitfalls to avoid. Applications of this work flow are illustrated through an in-depth discussion of specific case studies in public health research at the university.
