Carmen Abroad is a project of scholars from Cardiff University that includes a map of performances of the opera Carmen from 1875-1945. Their map (and underlying database) provides production information covering dates, number of performances, venue address, cast members, along with whether the production is new. Included is a timeline of all performances, so one can peruse the productions of Carmen chronologically as well. In addition, they include embedded media, mainly posters and images of the first seventy years of the opera. Scholars or fans of the opera wishing to gain insight into the global spread of the production and explore the various adaptations would find this site useful.

This static map shows one way to answer the question “where are America’s leading centers for musicians and the music industry?” Charlotta Mellander of Martin Property Institute combined data on musicians and recording industry business establishments via the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, to create a Metro Music Index. This index provided map-able data ready for visualization. The higher the density, the higher the music index number, and darker the area on the map. As Richard Florida explains, this map not only shows density through clusters, but can provoke more questions about the influences and environments that made those clusters possible.

As part of a larger project called “Mapping Movement,” Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit’s “Mapping Touring” project seeks to visualize dance history through the domestic and international tours of ballet and modern dance companies during the 20th century. It displays data related to troupe, venue, date, works performed, and personnel in a searchable database, a map visualization of performances, and a map visualization of tour routes. On the performance map, you can select date ranges and specific troupes, allowing the viewer to follow one of the nine companies represented along their tour, or track overall performance patterns. 

Music-Map is a networking map that demonstrates and classifies people’s musical tastes through graphical spacial relations. An innovative conceptual map, Music-Map uses clusters and distance to illustrate the degree of relativity between artists, thereby suggesting the likeliness of a shared audience. Though quite different from the projects involved in musical geography, Music-Map provides an opportunity to examine the nature of space by disengaging spatial reference from geocodes. This project inspires contemplation for the possibility to not only locate individual events, but also highlight the connections between them in our own maps.

This site provides a map with the locations of composers’ homes, theaters, and important landmarks in Paris between 1900-1950. Additionally, it provides links to other pages in the City of Life website that detail specific information about public tourist attractions (this includes pictures, sound clips, and short films about the location). 

Richard Florida of the University of Toronto discusses the research that he and his team led to answer the question What does the geography of popular music look like? To do this, he and his team collected information from MySpace in 2007, to identify ten, specific popular genres and the number of plays or views each specific genre received. The proportional point maps portray the relative popularity of the specific musical genres in different general areas of the United States, causing the maps to be vague in terms of specific geographic locations. While visually engaging, the maps prevent access to the underlying data, prohibiting detailed data analysis.

The U.S. State Department has sponsored a “Database of Cultural Presentations” map that shows locations of U.S. touring groups’ performances during the Cold War. You can search in several categories, like group name, performance city, performance type, and performance country.

In addition to its own catalogue of sources, the Digital Resources in Musicology showcases “ADAM: Archive of Digital Applications in Musicology, EVE: Electronic and Virtual Editions, and Harvard’s Online Resources for Music Scholars.” The repository, which serves as a vast collection of ideas and information, aggregates study and research information for scholars. Within its categories, it provides links to GIS maps from different sources around the world – some of these maps show information from antiquity, while others include more modern information. 

This project is an interactive way to experience a religious service at St. Paul’s Cathedral and St. Paul’s Churchyard in the early 17th century. The site is divided into audio and visual perspectives on the events, with historical context for certain sound effects such as the sound of dogs barking or horse hooves on cobblestones. The project has been installed in the Teaching and Visualization Lab at NC State, where the user can have an immersive experience based off of the visual and auditory models.

Carmen Abroad is a project of scholars from Cardiff University that includes a map of performances of the opera Carmen from 1875-1945. Their map (and underlying database) provides production information covering dates, number of performances, venue address, cast members, along with whether the production is new. Included is a timeline of all performances, so one can peruse the productions of Carmen chronologically as well. In addition, they include embedded media, mainly posters and images of the first seventy years of the opera. Scholars or fans of the opera wishing to gain insight into the global spread of the production and explore the various adaptations would find this site useful.

The Global Jukebox is a project initiated by Columbia Univeristy musicologist, Alan Lomax. He created an interactive tool that allows users to see the similarities between folk song traditions around the world. The user can choose to navigate the Global Jukebox either through a spinning wheel, hence the “Jukebox” title, or grouped markers on a world map. A good starting point is the “Journeys” option which gives in-depth information about a certain topic along with musical examples. Due to the large and ambitious scope of this project, the Global Jukebox functions as a great introduction to folk music research.

Musicmap is a visual genealogy that introduces the history of, and relationships between, popular music genres. The incorporation of database construction with verbal and multimedia elaboration not only builds the macroscopic frames of popular musical genres, but also highlights the ambiguity and inconsistency in regard to individual cases. In addition, effective visualizations such as color coding, gridding, and family tree symbols balance the complexity of the subject with accessibility for the users to capture the information. Musicmap is a good example of a digital humanities project that contributes to both public knowledge and professional studies.

In 2002 the University of Santa Barbara began digitizing a collection of over 10,000 wax cylinders, the recording precursor to vinyl. This method was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which makes it a particularly useful resource for studying the recordings of that era. In addition to a database of recordings, there are curated playlists as well as articles on the historical background of wax cylinder recordings. There is also a Vernacular Wax Recordings Database which includes at-home recordings of American life from as early as 1890.

This project by Katya Deve situates the history of hip hop in particular times and places, starting in the South Bronx in 1973. Deve’s use of a map in representing and analyzing the history of this art form is highly appropriate, as hip hop is a highly geographically influenced musical genre. The time slider allows the viewer to navigate fluidly between the years of 1973 and 2016. The view transforms into a cluster map as yellow circles appear and expand across a map of the continental United States, representing over a thousand different notable hip hop artists and their hometowns. The user is able to click on individual artists and listen to a clip of one of their songs. 

Radio Garden is produced by Studio Puckey and Moniker, both Amsterdam-based design studios. This interactive globe delivers radio transmissions from across the globe based on location. Notably, it streams many stations from Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia, and addresses cultures that may have been poorly documented and preserved throughout history. This source provides immediately meaningful visualizations of radio livestreams, even if they only can show radio stations with online presences.

This interactive website includes documentation of noise complaints in New York in the 1920s. The site, with excellent presentation and citing of information, includes separate tabs on the time, space, and sounds of this period of history. These sounds come from automobiles, loud neighbors, and immigrant communities. 

Artists in Paris is an open-access digital humanities and art history project that maps hundreds of 18th-century artists’ homes and studios. This website’s database contains an entry for 471 artists. While it’s possible to search by artist name, drawing on personal knowledge of French 18th-century painters and sculptors, there is a handy Guide section that explains how to get the most out of the resource. Perhaps the easiest way to start using Artists in Paris is to filter by year, which produces color-coded markers on the map indicating addresses where artists lived. The color of the marker indicates the type of artist, such as history painter, engraver, or landscapist.

This particular website houses a number of projects which examine the applications of digital mapping to humanities research. A number of the featured projects focus on world conflicts (management and history) with provided summaries and links to each project site. This is a very detailed website, and provides a diverse assortment of sources for future research as well as being an exhibition of research conducted at Columbia University. The most helpful tabs for the semi-casual visitor are “About” and “Projects,” but it’s also worth the time to explore current projects or research within the digital spatial humanities via the “News” and “Publications” tabs.

Based on maps produced by the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1899, this interactive, time-sensitive map shows the expansion of United States territory from the late 18th through the late 19th century in terms of land taken from Native Americans, rather than empty land claimed by settlers (as most other maps of this process show.)

Created through a collaboration between professors of Oxford and Victoria University in England, this is a map of “Early Modern London” which outlines buildings and roads in color-coded categories based on location. Any combination of the categories may be shown on the map, and clicking specific venues produces pop-ups that provide information about the location. In addition, the location-based pop-up shows users which supplemental documents are related to the content being viewed, providing hyperlinks to other features on the site.  The entire site is open-code, open-access, and open-source.

Named after the work of Monroe Nathan Work, this project maps every known lynching in American history carried out by a mob. Each marker on the map represents one incident, and each color represents a different racial/ethnic demographic. The map is accompanied by a timeline that ranges from the first known lynching in 1835 to 1964. You can easily drag over the timeline to change the range of dates presented in the map. The map of the U.S. itself is presented in generalized regions like “the Deep South” and “the Far West” for historical context. One especially unique feature of this map is the way that the bibliography is linked – for each data point, the source cited can be accessed on the website after one click.

Statistician Nathan Yau’s Flowing Data site was introduced to us via a specific project: this map of pizza place geography in the United States. The map isn’t interactive, yet it communicates data extremely clearly, thanks to the side-by-side comparison of map layers shown underneath the main image. This project serves as a good reminder that interactivity, media-richness, and animations aren’t required to make an effective and engaging map. The rest of the Flowing Data website offers dozens of striking data visualizations, from animated maps showing the change in unemployment rate over time, to U.S. maps that compare the locations of firearm dealers versus popular food vendors. 

This map uses maps to visualize the racial divide in several US cities. The creator of this map used a certain technique, called force-directed mapping, to differentiate certain divides. The map takes racial demographic data from the 2010 census, and then creates links between neighboring sections of a city. If the demographic makeup of two neighborhoods is similar, they will hardly separate. If there are contrasting demographics, the city sections will separate drastically. This visualization is effective in that it shows how de facto segregation within cities is literally creating racial divides. 

This creation of the University of Iowa provides intuitive interactive mapping through chronological, animated layers that show the spread of printing, paper mills, and other related subjects. Their pop-ups include links to the library’s site to find primary sources. 

This project from Messiah College and Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is a model for using census data in conjunction with historical maps. With a 1901 Company Atlas, a team of students and faculty combed through 1900 Census Data for the Town of Harrisburg and joined that data with polygons for each residence. The map includes a search function for first and last name, as well as location. 

Locating Lutheranism, funded by St. Olaf College’s Digital Humanities on the Hill initiative, seeks to learn about Norwegian-American Lutheran populations in MN through mapping and analyzing the names, locations, and census information associated with historical and present-day Lutheran congregations. Student and faculty collaborators use WordPress and ArcGIS to display their data, and to focus on four particular Minnesota congregations that drew their attention. On their site, they include multiple maps to show different ideas. Their site shows clear purpose, data, process, and results. Additionally, you can use the search bar on their site to search for towns and keywords related to the Lutheran Church in Minnesota.

Prepare to be wowed by the graphics in this glowing map that tracks the trade in arms (weaponry) over a twenty-year span: 1992-2012. The timeline at the bottom of the page permits an easy view of change over time. Additionally, the globe at the center of the page can be manipulated to look at various points from different angles, and also click on different regions of the world. The colorcoded toolbar at the left corresponds to the volume of trade in dollars of various kinds of arms dealing (such as civilian weapons vs. ammunition) and uses a color for each kind of import/export. 

The maps on this research blog are intended both to support research on the dance touring practices by Kate Elswit  (in her ongoing collaboration with Harmony Bench) and to inspire new research questions. The maps are  “exploratory visualizations” of the American Ballet Caravan’s progress in 1941 South America. The bright lines, circles, and polygons overlaying highlight the possible connections between the dancers on the tour. The maps, and must-read surrounding research blog, bring up interesting questions about the intersections between individual dancers, the company, and the many places to and from which they travel.

The Pompeii Bibliography and Mapping Project uses writings about the ancient city to create a map that reflects the city’s original layout. Using ArcGIS, this project provides a new way to engage with detailed information provided by numerous publications on Pompeii. In addition to providing visualizations of all the data, the project makes all core data available for download and later use. The map’s layers provide illustrative details about the city’s design, including elevation points, building functions, and curbstone materials.