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Your Portal to the Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia

MapScholar

From the MapScholar website: 

MapScholar is a dynamic visualization tool for historic map collections.  It offers a free, open-source portal that gives individual scholars the independent means of gathering high-resolution images from a variety of sources, analyzing them in rich geospatial contexts, and illustrating new interpretations in the history of cartography and related humanities fields.  MapScholar enhances traditional books and articles by making it possible–at no cost to publishers–to mount stunning web displays of map collections assembled from archival photographs, commissioned scans, and digital collections hosted by libraries around the world.  It guides scholars through the process of georeferencing their maps, tagging them with basic metadata, and preparing their collections for display.  New features that allow scholars to annotate maps and create animated tours of map collections will make MapScholar.org an indispensable center for the study of the history of cartography.  Making use of robust, free web resources such as Google Docs and Flickr, MapScholar gives any scholar with basic computer skills and a broadband connection the capacity to see and share their maps in compelling new ways.  MapScholar’s key innovation is how it brings maps together—regardless of the archive in which they sit—for the purpose of generating new knowledge about human perceptions of geographic space.  Unlike digital map archives maintained by libraries, we see maps as sources for analysis and interpretation that need to be pulled into relationship with one another to be understood rather than discrete artifacts to be considered one after another.