Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Tudor Networks | Data Visualization | History

Metadata, Surveillance and the Tudor State. The Tudor government maintained a communication network that criss-crossed the globe. This visualisation brings together 123,850 letters connecting 20,424 people from the United Kingdom’s State Papers archive, dating from the accession of Henry VIII to the death of Elizabeth I (1509-1603). On this page we can see all people […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Epistemic Violence and Resistance through Mapping Kinds

From the very beginning of the fellowship I was extremely eager to participate in the spatial mapping workshops. The reading I remember most from the only philosophy course I ever took defined map making as the process of using generalizations via simplification, symbolization, induction, and classification to construct a physical ontology [1]. This articulated an […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Visualizing North China Under Japanese Occupation

The North China Railway Archive (華北交通アーカイブ) is an online database of digitized stock photographs illustrating life under Japanese occupation in interwar North China. It contains more than 39,000 photographs taken in various parts of North China between 1939 and 1945 commissioned by the North China Transportation Company (J. Kahoku Kōtsū Kabushiki Gaisha 華北交通株式会社) for promotional […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: How we used math to explore racial segregation in Pennsylvania public school districting

American life is based on American thought. American thought is based on American values. And American values have a foundation in the public school system. So what happens when the American public school system is flawed? Although the “separate but equal” school system was deemed unconstitutional in the 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education, […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Social Scientific Applications of Historical GIS

In a previous piece in the Digital Orientalist, Giulia Buriola went over geo-referencing examples in QGIS. Here I would like to introduce readers to another common geographic analysis software they might encounter on the market: ArcGIS, and show how this software might be applied to social scientific historical research. Readers may be familiar with this […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Mapping the Effects of COVID-19

In March 2020, when the COVID-19 virus started to spread throughout New York City, former Digital Fellow Javier Otero Peña and I got together to think about the ways mapping could be used to identify some of the challenges produced by the pandemic. At the time we were co-coordinating the GIS /Mapping Working Group on […]