Spatial History Project at Stanford University (review)

Founded in 2007, the Spatial History Project is part of Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Erik Steiner, the project’s creative director, explains that its goal is “to reconstruct past landscapes in order to understand how they were produced, experienced, and ultimately transformed.” ¹Although the work of the Spatial History Project is quite diverse, its researchers share a common focus on analyzing spatial relationships and mapping changing human and nonhuman landscapes. The project’s website offers a showcase of the wide-ranging collaborative and interdisciplinary work that historians, computer scientists, geographers, anthropologists, designers, and their students are doing under its auspices or through partner organizations. The website features an absorbing database of essays, maps, and, most important, data visualizations on topics ranging from the transcontinental railroad and butchers in San Francisco to changing European borders during World War II and Chile’s aquaculture industry. A locus of creative energy and collaborative research at Stanford, the project is clearly a valuable resource for professors and graduate and undergraduate students. All who are interested in analyzing how landscapes have changed over time and the significance of spatial relationships in the past and present should be aware of it.

The genesis of the project lies with Richard White, the well-known historian of the American West, who used funds from a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create it. White subsequently drew on the assembled resources of the project in the latter stages of his book project Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America(2011). ²It is therefore unsurprising that the associated “Shaping the West” section of the Spatial History Project website contains the most extensive material and largest array of visualizations on any single topic. (Interested readers can also visit the book’s companion website, which allows for detailed analysis of White’s footnotes by topic. An innovative experiment in book publishing, the Railroadedwebsite could be a useful teaching tool—particularly in a historical methods course—but it is not likely to engage a broad readership in the way the book did.)

The work of the Spatial History Project extends far beyond the transcontinental railroad, however. Many of its sections have an environmental history focus. “Between the Tides,” for example, examines how San Francisco Bay and its shoreline have changed over time. I was particularly enthralled with an analysis of the bay’s salt ponds, which made the transition away from industrial usage and became the first urban national wildlife refuge. ³Another San Francisco–based environmental history project—Andrew Robichaud’s “Animal City”—maps animal-related businesses and industries in the city. In a compelling series of visualizations, Robichaud, who is a PhD candidate at Stanford, illustrates how the distribution of slaughterhouses and butchers in San Francisco shifted over the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the essay that accompanies the data visualizations, Robichaud writes: “One of the exciting parts of making maps and creating new evidence for analysis is that it raises more questions than it answers. Creating maps often opens up new sets of questions for the historian to take to the archives.” ⁴This statement nicely encapsulates the overall approach of the Spatial History Project. The data visualizations are tools for research, not ends in themselves, and their creators hope they will open new lines of inquiry and lead to unexpected insights.

Although many of the website’s featured projects examine the history of the West, specifically California and the Bay Area, affiliated researchers have by no means limited themselves to a regional, or even national, focus. “Chinese Canadian Stories: Uncommon Histories from a Common Past,” for example, is a collaborative project of the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, the Spatial History Project, and other campus and community partners. Its goal is to develop a “one-stop web portal” for information about Chinese Canadian history. Although it is only a small piece of the larger project...