In the digital humanities, mapping offers another way to provide information in a way that engages the audience. Histories of the National Mall, for example, uses a map interface as a gateway for visitors to explore the Mall in a different way. As the developer explained, there are no markers about the history of the space – the Omeka based site serves as digital historical markers.  

Digital mapping tools are powerful for visualizing data. Through digital mapping, relationships, change over time, aggregation or dispersion, and paths/vectors can be highlighted or explored. In an exercise with the Kepler.gl, layers and filters were added to datasets to understand patterns and identify possible relationships between the data (interview information from the WPA Slave narratives).  Some of the questions it left me with were regarding the clusters of interviews geographically, I am thinking I should have played with adding towns and cities, to look closer at what communities may have been targeted by the interviews, or whether it was a random distribution of the survivors of enslavement.

The timeline map also raised some interesting questions as the interview dates clustered in the spring and summer, vice an even distribution across the dates. It leads to the question of were the interviews rushed, or funding running out, or was it just the time available (See map below).