This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy. The Spatial History Project was active at Stanford University from 2007-2022, engaging in dozens of collaborative projects led by faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, visiting scholars and others at Stanford and beyond. More than 150 undergraduate students from more than a dozen disciplines contributed to these projects. In addition to a robust intellectual exchange built through these partnerships, research outputs included major monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, museum exhibitions, digital articles, robust websites, and dozens of lightweight interactive visualizations, mostly developed with Adobe Flash (now defunct). While most of those publications live on in other forms, the content exclusive to this website is preserved in good faith through this static version of the site. Flash-based content is partially available in emulated form using the Ruffle emulator.
Nineteenth-Century Crowdsourcing
Led by Sarah Ogilvie, this project investigates scholarly enterprises that sought contributions from the public in the nineteenth century. Just as Wikipedia in recent years took advantage of new and faster communications via the Internet, so those engaged in large-scale intellectual projects in the nineteenth century sought to make use of new, emerging communication systems (mail, railways, shipping lines) that were rapidly connecting people around the globe. This project looks at how the expertise of professionals was harnessed, as well as the industry of keen autodidacts, especially women. We apply network analysis and data visualizations to archive material, to answer questions about sharing, ownership, and dissemination of ideas and knowledge in the nineteenth century.
Project Research Assistants include Sandhini Argarwal, Mirae Lee, Brooke Mandujano, Samuel Mignot, Tyler Lemon, Isi Okojie, May Peterson, Angelica Previte, Holly Slang, Kenny Smith, Luz Tur-Sinai Gozal, and Riya Verma.
Lead Researcher
