April 1^th Release

A Decade of Fire in Western Australia
Developed in collaboration with anthropologists Doug and Rebecca Bird, Brian Codding, Pete Kauhanen, and indigenous Martu artists, this visualization demonstrates the ecological benefits of 10 years of waru, the use of fire as a land management practice by Martu in the deserts of Western Australia.

March 13^th Release

Vulnerability in Production: Road and Housing Networks
In a follow-up to their work published last summer, the Vulnerability in Production project is pleased to present a new visualization that presents a fine-grained analysis of the development of transportation and housing in the Oakland Firestorm Area. Fittingly, the visualization shares its title with the project's title, as it emphasizes how the 1991 Oakland Hills (Tunnel) Firestorm event is part of a larger process of regional economic development and natural resource management.

March 1^st Release

Chinese Canadian Immigrant Pipeline, 1912-1923 and Chinese Canadian Immigrant Flows, 1912-1923
These two visualizations are the recent outcome of our collaboration with Henry Yu's team at University of British Columbia. They present two different ways of looking month by month at 4,000 Chinese immigrants in the Head Tax Database between 1912 and 1923.

Reconstructing Conservation History: A link between ecology and history
This slideshow describes the Reconstructing Conservation History project led by our new post-doc Maria Santos. The research is a collaboration between the Spatial History Project and the Bill Lane Center.

December 1^st Release

Arrests of Italian Jews, 1943-1945

Between September 1943 and March 1945, some 10,000 Jews were arrested in Italy and deported to Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Only about 800 survived; the vast majority of them perished in Auschwitz. The objective of this visualization, which includes data on over 6,000 Jewish individuals, is to help discover, describe, and explain the spatio-temporal patterns of the Holocaust in Italy.

November 1^st Release

The Evolution of the SS Concentration Camp System, 1933-1945

This animation is intended to be used as an exploratory tool for understanding the impact and evolution of the continent-wide Nazi system of exploitation and control: the concentration camp system. The visualization raises several lines of potential inquiry into the spatial and temporal patterns of this evolution. We welcome and encourage your input: What patterns do you notice?

Conflict on the Q! : Dismissals of Burlington Railroad Workers, 1877-1888

This paper explores the dimensions of labor relations between a major Gilded Age railroad conglomerate and its employees. By digitizing and visualizing reams of employee dismissal data collected by the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad Company, the authors shed light on an era of rising conflict between large corporations and workers, and a hard life on the railroad often blunted by alcohol abuse.

Memoriás Postumás: A Novel and a Network in Five Minutes

In this narrated visualization, the characters in Machado de Assis's masterpiece are presented in the space of social networks and, at the same time, in the space of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Music and photographs combine with maps and network diagrams to illuminate the space of the novel.

October 1^st Release

The Plays of França Júnior: Staging the Social in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

Using the tools provided along with this visualization, it is possible to begin to explore questions regarding patterns of interaction in Brazilian society, particularly in the city of Rio de Janeiro, during the second half of the nineteenth century. Who could speak in the realistically imagined universe of França Júnior's plays? How was speech differentiated by gender, age, race, class, and the social positions of speakers and listeners?

Speculative Spaces: Land Speculation and Social Formation in Two California Counties

Building on earlier work that revealed the impact of land speculation on development in Fresno County, this work explores how different patterns of land ownership in neighboring Tulare County resulted in markedly different patterns of development. The findings presented here provide exciting new insights into the history of the San Joaquin Valley in the late nineteenth century, and demonstrate a great variability of development within the valley that has previously gone undetected.

September 1^st Release

Summer 2011 proved to be a busy and productive one at the Spatial History Lab. Listed below are five new and striking additions to our visualization gallery.

First off are two visualizations produced by Gregory Simon's Vulnerability in Production team:

Water Vulnerability in the Oakland Hills: Oakland Firestorm, 1991

How did the loss of power to a critical pump in the Amito Water System lead to inadequate water supply in uphill reservoirs to combat the 1991 Oakland Firestorm? This animation of the fire's rapid spread through the hills and simultaneous failure of the water system needed to combat it, raises questions about the feasibility and responsibility of situating communities at the rugged urban/wildland fringe.

Vulnerability in Production: A case study of the Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland, California

How did historic land use decisions inform the modern development of a vulnerable residential landscape? This visualization explores development through the lenses of logging, property ownership, roads, vegetation, marketing, and water systems that ultimately led up to the Oakland Firestorm in 1991.

The next two also the first visualizations published for their respective projects:

The Demic Atlas Project: A non-state-based approach to mapping global economic and social development

How do different groupings of mapping units change a map's message? Conventional depictions of economic and social indices, like Gross Domestic Product and the Human Development Index, often make comparisons between drastically different entities, like China, with a population of 1.3 billion persons, and Tuvalu, with ten thousand. The Demic Atlas project proposes an alternate framework, regrouping the world into comparably-populous zones to provide a contrasting view of these indices.

Cigarette Citadels Bricolage

How does a cigarette factory's external appearance influence the surrounding community's perception of its internal production activities? This artistic representation features the variety of the architectural elements found in tobacco factories, from fenestration and style to square footage and fencing.

And finally, this entry marks a new addition for Andrew Gerhart's team:

Social Unrest Surrounding Chilean Aquaculture, 2000-2010

The majority of fresh salmon eaten in the United States is farmed in Chilean Patagonia, a region associated with notions of pristine wilderness. But who are the people that live in this region, and how has the industry impacted them? This visualization explores the places and events that mark escalating protests of an expanding salmon aquaculture industry in Chile.

The Spatial History Project has plenty more in store for the fall, so be sure to keep on eye out for new additions!

July 27^th Release

NOW LIVE: Supplementary Site to Richard White's Railroaded

Richard White's latest publication, Railroaded, an incisive history of the transcontinental railroads and how they transformed America in the decades after the Civil War is now available. Click here to access the online augmentation to the printed book that provides an interactive medium for readers to access and explore the collection of over 2,000 footnotes, sources, visualizations, and downloadable data files!

July 1^st Release

New Visualization: Transcontinental Railroad Development, 1879-1893

Were railroads built ahead of demand? Check out the Shaping the West team's latest visualization of Transcontinental Railroad Development from 1879 to 1893, to explore the relations between population density and railroad construction.