Univ. Richmond partners with Azavea to build Civil War emancipation geo web app, displays 3,000 events

In school, lessons about the emancipation of slaves during the Civil War tend to focus on the struggles of individuals — of Lincoln or soldiers or those enslaved.

The University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab imagined that there might be a better, more thorough way to tell the emancipation story if you could see it — on a map.

The lab, led by Richmond president and historian of the American South Edward L. Ayers and the lab’s associate director Scott Nesbit, teamed up with Callowhill-based GIS development firm Azavea to build “Visualizing Emancipation” an interactive map that documents 3,000 events — from news reports to fugitive slave notices — that contributed to the end of the practice of slavery in the United States.

Visit the tool here.

The map allows researchers, teachers and students alike to focus in on various aspects of the Civil War and how it tracked with the progress of emancipation, or zoom out to get a sense of the huge swath of the country affected by the conflict.

Using a high performance geoprocessing GeoTrellis framework, Azavea helped build a variety of features, like the heat map which demonstrates the density of events in particular area or an animation which shows the progress of events across location and time. The application also makes use of both open source and commercial software, including OpenLayers, GeoServer, PostGIS and an ArcGIS Online base map, according to the press release.

Events were sources from newspapers, letters and diaries from Cornell University’s Making of America digital collection, Tufts University’s Perseus Project digital library, the University of Virginia’s Valley of the Shadow online archive, and University of Richmond’s Richmond Daily Dispatch digitized newspaper archive.

“The trick is finding and making events visible, while acknowledging the complexity of when, where and how slavery fell apart in the U.S.  The site aims to make exploring emancipation more straightforward and understandable,” Nesbit said in the release.

The project was funded through an Office of Digital Humanities startup grant of $48,155 as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities We the People initiative. The University of Richmond then matched the grant, offering approximately $98,500 in cash and in-kind support, according to the press release.

Going forward, the university hopes to incorporate the “Visualizing Emancipation” map into larger digital Atlas of American History. In the meantime, it’s easy to see how a tool like this could change the way students learn and think about the Civil War.