Mapping

We have included maping functionality on this site to serve multiple purposes. We hope to help the user understand the geography of the Viola Muse Digital Edition, as well as provide a visual interface into the collection. In a broader sense, we have sought to create a tool for exploring the geography of nineteenth-century and early twentieth century Jacksonville and for interrogating relationships between race and the management of urban space.

To achieve these ends, we have developed a custom map viewer that allows users to navigate from documents into maps, from maps into documents, and from maps to other maps. This system permits a multiple-to-multiple relationship between places and documents and between places and maps. In practice, this means that a document can contain many place names, and by selecting any, the user can navigate to a map where that place is represented. By default, this is currently a Google Map for all places. From there, the user can, in many cases, navigate to historical maps where that same location appears (see, for instance, the representation of Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church on our default Google Map, as well as on other maps from 1885, 1891, and 1903, among others). The user can also navigate from the map viewer into other documents where that same place is mentioned. Likewise, the user can access other places that are indicated on a given map, and from there navigate either to the corresponding documents or maps. The Place Index is a static document that shows on one page the relationships between documents and maps, and serves as another potential entry point into both.

We have also created a viewer for invoking specific theme-based maps with multiple locations, which we have embedded on the following pages: Viola Muse, An Altered Landscape, and The Southeast and the World. 

We explain in greater detail the concept model and technical archicture employed in constructing this tool in the article "The Viola Muse Map Viewer: A Platform for Visualizing Multiple Relationships Between Texts, Places, and Maps," currently in development.