From The D.C. Underground Atlas -- a history of the construction of the D.C. Metro.

A global look at where our night lights have turned on or dropped out

Created by the Intertribal Timber Council, this site presents video, audio, maps, infographics, and more to illustrate the challenges and opportunities that exist in tribal forest management today.

The research reported in this paper is part of an ongoing project on promoting Aboriginal cultural storytelling using mobile participatory mapping applications and web-based interactive storymaps. This paper presents a conceptual framework for developing a co-designed participatory storymap. The storymap aims to ubiquitously collect location-based knowledge and stories in both online and offline modes, as well as present an interactive web map that dynamically integrates information recorded as georeferenced texts, images, audios, and videos. The participatory mapping has a potential to allow Aboriginal communities to capture and preserve their cultural heritage on their own using a smartphone or tablet. Ethical co-designing process of implementing the storymaps is also discussed.

The rise of crowdsourced and participatory digital platforms which aim to make visible the experiences of otherwise marginalised people are significant within the broader landscape of digitally mediated community spaces. One example of such media is Queering the Map, a digital storymapping platform where users anonymously pin ‘queer moments’ and memories to places. While the mediation of affect and intimacy in digital spaces among queer people is increasingly attended to in scholarly work, the cartographic and archival remains hitherto underexplored. Drawing on an analysis of almost 2000 micro-stories geolocated to Australia, in this article we explore various aspects of story contribution that situate Queering the Map as a lively cartographic archive. Rather than necessarily anonymous (as the platform dictates), the posts, we argue, entail various deliberated directions or gestures, encoded for audiences: what we term stories for someone. We highlight these publicly private stories’ connective and affective underpinnings, and the political potentialities (and problems) therein for queer belonging and community-building. In doing so we seek to contribute to scholarship on digital archives, crowdsourcing, and advance conceptualisations of digital intimacies.

Students in “A Radical History of SF Chinatown: Designing a Digital Tour” worked with two community partners to dig deeply into the rich history of this thriving district in San Francisco and share it with a public audience.
Project-based learning provides opportunities for students to deepen their research and improve a variety of skills. By preparing a public-facing website, students took responsibility for undertaking research in which accuracy is consequential; for creating writing that is clear and compelling; and for creating visuals that are meaningful and effective in conveying information.
Students created an interactive map of meaningful locations in Chinatown, giving visitors to the website access to an array of articles they wrote on themes including culture, education, housing, public health and public space.
This case study provides an overview of the arc of the semester that allowed students to both conduct research produce a website. It will be useful to instructors in history, ethnic studies, and other disciplines who wish to experiment with project-based learning and public-facing work.