Presenters:
- Brennan Collins, Associate Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, Georgia State University.
- Joe Hurley, Data Services and GIS Librarian, Georgia State University.
- Sarah Melton, Digital Projects Coordinator Emory University Center for Digital Scholarship.
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
2pm Eastern (11am Pacific | 12pm Mountain | 1pm Central)
Register: https://goo.gl/B4c20j
Description:
What happens when you layer a science project on top of a walking tour on top
of an art experiment on top of an archival map on top of demographic data on
top of a memoir? What if the archives of multiple universities and other
institutions could be accessed on one platform and layered with the projects,
stories, and data from researchers, teachers, students, and community groups?
The ATLmaps.com project attempts to answer these questions. The platform, a
collaboration between Georgia State University and Emory University, combines
archival maps, geospatial data visualization, and user contributed multimedia
location pinpoints to promote investigation into any number of issues about
Atlanta. While currently focused on one city to demonstrate the power of
stacking thousands of layers of information on one place, this innovative
online platform will eventually allow users to layer an increasing number of
interdisciplinary data to address the complex issues that any city poses. The
project looks to offer a framework that incorporates storytelling reliant on
geospatial data and for normalizing input across a range of data sets so that
material can be cross-compared in novel ways, allowing users to make
connections between seemingly unrelated data sources and ask questions that
would not be apparent when only looking at one particular project. The ATLmaps
also encourages knowledgeable members of the university and local communities
to curate data on the site to demonstrate the possibilities for synthesizing
material across projects and data types.
In this webinar, we will provide an overview and demonstration of ATLmaps. We
will explain how the platform came out of two large map digitization projects,
faculty development efforts connected to teaching and learning, and several
local documentaries. We will also discuss roadblocks and successes in the
development process-building a geoserver, copyright issues, search
functionality, funding, and working across disciplinary and institutional
boundaries.