Digital Atlas of Indios Pueblos
Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, El Colegio de Mexico, presented by Caverlee Cary, GIS Center, University of California, Berkeley
cari@uclink.berkeley.edu

With the publication of the first atlas of Indian towns in the area once known as New Spain the research community has access to a research resource for study of native Americans under Spanish rule. The Atlas presents 84 original maps, prepared using cartographic software, on which are located the 4,468 Indian towns which existed in 1800, from Sonora in the north to Yucatan in the south. It also contains photographs of 52 eighteenth-century maps of Indian towns, from archives in Mexico and Spain. From data prepared for the printed publication, a digital mapping project has been developed. This presentation describes the development of the on-line resource, undertaken in collaboration with the GIS Center at UC Berkeley and the application of GIS technology in historical research.

The Atlas presents 84 original maps, prepared using cartographic software, on which are located the 4,468 Indian towns which existed in 1800, from Sonora in the north to Yucatan in the south. It also contains photographs of 52 eighteenth-century maps of Indian towns, from archives in Mexico and Spain.

Historical GIS as a community resource: the vision of Britain through time project
Paul Ell, Queen's University, Belfast
paul.ell@qub.ac.uk

This paper discusses the transformation of the Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System into an accessible resource for the casual scholarly user and the community more generally.

The Great Britain GIS was the first national historical GIS to be completed. As with other systems developed subsequently, it contains polygon data representing various administrative boundaries for the modern mapping age and associated statistical data largely drawn from official censuses, in this instance from 1801. Until recently only academic users have been able to access the material and to make use of it they have required a reasonable working knowledge of GIS software. However, following a large grant, it has now been possible to make much of the content of the GIS available online over the internet through an accessible web interface. The project team, based at the Universities of Portsmouth, Leeds and Queen’s Belfast, have also added a range of additional material to the GIS including historical maps, texts from historical gazetteers and selected travellers’ tales.

This paper describes the content of the online HGIS or electronic cultural atlas and its functionality.

Dynamic Maps and Cultural Atlases
Jeanette Zerneke, University of California, Berkeley
jlz@berkeley.edu

ECAI members are developing websites with dynamic maps, cultural atlases, and ePublications. What have we learned in the process of developing this wide variety of resources? A variety of issues, not all technical, have been identified. They include:
· Time is as important as space in cultural atlases and many historical representations.
· In this area as in others, system designers must consider the availability of Internet access and the skill-base of their users.
· Data for creating the context for cultural presentations has been hard to find and copyright issues are unclear.
· There is a tension between developing distributed / global infrastructures and the holding of local knowledge
· There are often difficulties of representing qualitative, incomplete or contested data in computer systems, which require quantitative data.
· We know there is a wide range of cultural paradigms relating to time and space. How can these be represented using computer tools?
· Integration of spatio-temporal displays with other media in websites is crucial and not always easy. A system with good integration can greatly enhance a users understanding of the material by blending visual and written explanations of information.
This presentation will briefly address these issues and give examples of ways that ECAI projects are addressing them.