What is the NEH Community Deep Mapping Institute and Symposium?
The NEH Community Deep Mapping Institute (CDMI) is a collective of community deep mapping scholars and practitioners jointly run by Michigan Tech and Wayne State Universities. The Institute was founded in 2024 by an initial grant from the NEH and accepted 57 fellows from 9 project teams, representing over 13 academic and professional disciplines.
Now, the CDMI runs a year-long hybrid institute for new fellows every other year (next in 2027) with virtual training sessions and an immersive 8 day summer session. In alternate years, the CDMI Symposium brings together previous fellows with a growing community of deep mapping scholars, professionals, and students to share ongoing projects and cultivate new fellows.
Apply for the 2027 Community Deep Mapping Institute that will be held in-person in Michigan's Copper Country, June 16-23, 2027.
Institute Purpose and Need
The Institute will focus on expanding the scope and practice of deep mapping by integrating public-facing, transdisciplinary scholarship into the spatial humanities. Our aim is to move from the established robust theories and concepts of deep mapping towards developing a foundation of practice, with a specific emphasis on supporting community histories through the use of advanced spatial and digital technologies. Institute fellows receive instruction from leading experts in the digital and spatial humanities and a wide-range of heritage fields. They apply their new skills with advanced geospatial tools, and visualization/interpretive techniques, by each creating a prototype deep map using data drawn from their own active research programs.
Institute Objectives
2025 Fellows receiving technical assistance on their deep map development
The NEH Community Deep Mapping Institute is drawing together a group of participants who have shared interests in the digital and spatial humanities, as well as individual expertise in archaeology, geography, history, heritage, interpretation, public history, and community-based research.
The institute has four central objectives:
This institute's key focus is the 'doing of deep mapping'. As an expected outcome, each institute participant will have built a prototype (or more advanced) community-centered, public-facing deep map in an area of their interest. Fellows leave with the tools, resources, and a network of experts that will support continued development of their deep maps.
The institute has four central objectives:
- Train new and established scholars and professionals in the use and coupling together of advanced geospatial tools to advance approaches in doing deep mapping.
- Establish best practices for creating public-facing deep maps through community-based research, design, and evaluation processes.
- Determine methods for, and approaches to, applying augmented and mobile technologies that create immersive experiences built upon the robust historical spatial data infrastructures that form the basis of many current deep mapping projects such as the Keweenaw Time Traveler and Hamtramck Spatial Archaeology Project.
- Demonstrate how transdisciplinary collaborations will contribute to building more inclusive communities of practice across academic fields and between academic-based scholars and non-academic heritage practitioners.
This institute's key focus is the 'doing of deep mapping'. As an expected outcome, each institute participant will have built a prototype (or more advanced) community-centered, public-facing deep map in an area of their interest. Fellows leave with the tools, resources, and a network of experts that will support continued development of their deep maps.
What is Community Deep Mapping?
Deep maps integrate information and representations about space, time, architecture, material culture, environment, and community knowledge into a spatially and temporally scaled digital platform that affords open-ended exploration of a particular time and place (Bodenhamer, Corrigan, Harris 2013; Ridge, Lafreniere, Nesbit 2013). Deep maps are discursive resources that can be designed to visualize changes in human-environmental relationships over time and to accommodate multiple voices in the creation of community-based narratives. Over the past decade, alongside the growth of digital and spatial humanities scholarship, researchers from a range of humanities fields have succeeded in developing disciplinary-specific theoretical approaches to deep maps. However, the potential of deep mapping and recognition of its broader intellectual impacts in the humanities have not yet been fully realized because of the lack of transdisciplinary and public collaboration. This institute, will, for the first time, bring together an otherwise disparate group of scholars and professionals to expand the scope and refine the practices of doing deep mapping together.
Fellows learning how to use mobile deep mapping technologies on Michigan Tech's Campus in Summer 2025
Institute Overview
Institute fellows developing collaborative community-driven deep maps during the 2025 Institute
The NEH Community Deep Mapping Institute has brought together 57 fellows, from 9 project teams, from a wide range of backgrounds and experience to learn how to apply community-based practices and methods together with technical experience to develop a suite of new deep mapping projects in the areas of interest and for the communities important to the institute fellows. A further 9 to 12 project teams will be accepted as fellows for the 2027 Institute taking place in Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula June 16-23.
Institute fellows have been learning a wide range of technical and professional skills that are needed to successfully develop their own deep mapping projects.
These include but are not limited to:
Institute fellows have been learning a wide range of technical and professional skills that are needed to successfully develop their own deep mapping projects.
These include but are not limited to:
- Identifying archival and digital sources
- Basic GIS skills such as geocoding, georeferencing and digitizing
- Digital spatial storytelling and placemaking
- Public engagement with deep maps
- Creating historical spatial data infrastructures
- No-code/low code mobile apps for deep mapping
- Constructing historical built and social environments
- Outreach and education plans for deep mapping projects
- Integrating deep maps with augmented and mobile technologies
- Use of AI in Deep Mapping
Learn more about Michigan Technological University and Wayne State University, the hosts of the NEH Deep Mapping Institute
Discover Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula. Learn why the region's natural beauty and active heritage community make it an ideal host location.
Information and biographic sketches of Institute directors, visiting faculty, instructors, presenters, and technical staff.