Keweenaw Time Travelers at the Social Sciences History Association

Several Historical Environments Spatial Analytics Lab faculty, staff, and students presented their work at the Social Science History Association meeting in Chicago this week.

​Dr. Don Lafreniere (Project Director) began the conference as a roundtable participant with other scholars from the U.S. and U.K. discussing models for building and sustaining Historical GIS projects. He also shared the next stages of the Keweenaw Time Traveler project, highlighting our recently released mobile app. He demonstrated this by importing a map segment of Chicago that allowed participants to see the historic Palmer House (where the conference was held) just as we can see towns around the Copper Country!

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​Dr. Dan Trepal (Senior Geospatial Research Scientist) presented recent work linking people’s census records through time. This allows us to follow people as they move throughout the area and country and sets the stage for lots of future projects!

​James Juip (Senior Research Associate) participated in a roundtable discussing a variety of projects related to place and attachment. This touched on a variety of subjects, including project sustainability and how to continue public engagement after funding has ceased.

​James was also joined remotely by Dr. Sarah Scarlett (Co-Project Director) for a presentation on education and outreach, during which they discussed how the Time Traveler has been used for K-12 education and some exciting future plans (stay tuned!).

​Timothy Stone (Senior Research Associate) presented an abridged version of his thesis which he defended two weeks ago. Here he focused on results and case studies, demonstrating how projects such as the Time Traveler allow for population-level and fined-grained analysis.

​Ryan Williams (Geospatial Research Scientist) presented his work and partnership with Monte Consulting to bring us version 2.0 of the Explore App (i.e. the current Time Traveler Interface). He also discussed the relationship between the databases housing Time Traveler data and the public interface.