Listed alphabetically by last name
A sampling of what members are doing, or have completed.
Burgundy, France historical and archaeological research (Scott Madry, Elizabeth Jones)
Dr. Madry has conducted regional archaeological
research in
the Burgundy region of France for 30 years. His research has focused on
the applications of GIS, remote sensing, predictive modeling,
visualization and related technologies to understand the evolving and
changing patterns of settlement and land-use over a period of 2,000 years
from the Iron Age to the present. Working collaboratively with an
interdisciplinary group of researchers, this project has looked at the
patterns of continuity and change as successive cultures have utilized,
and have themselves been influenced by, the landscape. This research has
developed an extensive GIS database of environmental and cultural data,
including archaeological sites, old roadways and river fords, resource
extraction sites, and other information. 
Predictive models have been
developed and the data have been used by other researchers in the area for
a variety of projects ranging from ecology, geomorphology, anthropology,
archaeology, and environmental management. The project team as scanned
historical maps of the study area dating from 1659, 1759, 1846, 1848,
1896, 1986 and 2003. In addition, historical aerial photos from 1945 and
remote sensing data from 1973-2003 have been integrated. Cultural and
historical features from the historical maps have been extracted using
innovative approaches developed by the team to create a historical GIS
database showing shifting patterns of land use and settlement from
numerous dates back to 1757, before the French revolution. These data are
being used to analyze a range of issues, including land use, settlement
patterns, demographics, property ownership, economic and production, and
related topics. Current work is being conducted with Dr. Elizabeth
Jones
and Dr. Amanda Tickner of UNC. See: http://informatics.org/france/france.html
for additional information
about this project.
Some of Scott Madry's other projects:
NC Piedmont: the Indian Trading Path and colonial settlement development (Rebecca Dobbs)
This project uses colonial landgrant records at the individual tract level
to examine regional spatial and temporal patterns of European settlement
during the
Piedmont's period of explosive growth through in-migration, the 1740s to
1760s. More specifically, Dr. Dobbs is investigating the role of
indigenous-origin roads, particularly the Indian Trading Path, in the
development of individual towns and of the overall settlement system,
which we now know as the Piedmont Urban Crescent. The reserach process
involves transcribing each extant landgrant record from the study area and
period, then creating shapes in GIS according to survey measurements in
the records, then locating the tracts in space, and lastly analyzing
patterns and interpreting them. 
Dr. Dobbs has posited a set
of processes
by which an existing feature such as the ITP might influence the
development of settlements and settlement systems; in Phase I of this
project, encompassing the Triangle area and environs, the emergence of
Hillsborough (on the ITP) well before any other towns in the area supports
her town-scale model and a strong role for the ITP. She is undertaking
additional research at Hillsborough to test her conclusions. The
remainder of the overall Piedmont study area will be studied in Phases II
and III, pending funding. Selected output maps and animations from Phase
I are available at http://www.unc.edu/~grdobbs/dissmaps.
NC towns and cities: multiple historical cultural landscape explorations (Robert Allen)
Going
to the Show documents and illuminates the
experience of movies and moviegoing in North Carolina from the
introduction of projected motion pictures (1896) to the end of the silent
film era (circa 1930).
Through its innovative use of more than 1000 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps
of forty-five towns and cities between 1896 and 1922, the project situates
early moviegoing within the experience of urban life in the state's big
cities and small towns. It highlights the ways that race conditioned the
experience of moviegoing for all North Carolinians- white, African
American, and American Indian. Its collection inventories every known N.C.
African American movie theater in operation between 1908 and 1963.
Supporting its documentation of more than 1300 movie venues across 200
communities is a searchable archive of thousands of contemporaneous
artifacts: newspaper ads and articles, photographs, postcards, city
directories, and 150 original architectural drawings.
Special features of Going to the Show include an in-depth case study of
moviegoing in Wilmington, North Carolina, that:
Movie theater architecture in the South is documented through the plans for 23 theaters designed by Erle Stillwell. Five extensive lesson plans have been developed to encourage teachers to use Going to the Show as a resource for teaching social and cultural history.
Main Street, Carolina (MSC) will be launched
Summer
2010. It is a free, web-based digital history resource that allows local
libraries, schools, museums, preservation and local history societies, and
other community organizations across N.C. to preserve, document, and
interpret their history. It provides organizations with a flexible,
user-friendly digital platform on which they can add a wide variety of
local data: historical and contemporary photographs, postcards,
newspaper
ads and articles, architectural drawings, historical commentary, family
papers, and excerpts from oral history interviews--all keyed to and
layered
on top of digitized historic maps.
Students in AMST 890, Virtual Cities: A Digital Humanities Laboratory, Fall 2010, will contribute to key demonstration projects within MSC and develop additional projects, pedagogic uses, and apps and features for the MSC toolkit. More detail about the course and MSC
Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California's Exclusionary Spaces (Richard Marciano)
The practice of redlining was initiated by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), a federal agency created in 1933 and signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as one of several New Deal measures meant to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. Redlining denied loans or made them harder to obtain based on "unfavorable" neighborhood attributes such as racial composition. HOLC's appraisal and redlining policies were eventually implemented across the nation and adopted by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), thereby institutionalizing exclusion, contributing to the fragmentation of communities, and profoundly shaping the American urban landscape.
T-RACES was designed to preserve, analyze, and make publicly accessible online digital versions of historical documents related to the practice of redlining neighborhoods in the 1930s and 1940s in eight California cities. The documents include city maps, neighborhood descriptions, interviews, financial and banking documents, and detailed city surveys that are a valuable source of information on California's history. The original materials are housed at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and are part of the Civilian Records holdings. The website includes historical maps of 8 areas: San Francisco, Oakland-Berkeley, San Jose, Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, Los Angeles and San Diego. The project will eventually be extended to include all the redlined cities of North Carolina: Asheville, Charlotte, Durham, Greensboro and Winston-Salem.
Bountiful Deserts and Imperial Shadows: Seeds of Knowledge and Corridors of Migration in Northern New Spain (1680-1820) (Cynthia Radding)
The project addresses three research questions: (1) How did native peoples shape their environments prior to European invasion through cultivation, gathering, and hunting, and how did these processes continue, in new ways, under colonial rule? (2) How can we trace changing ethnic identities through historical sources and methods to retrieve the dynamic quality of kinship and political affiliations? (3) How do cultural practices become usable knowledge for contemporaries, and how has that knowledge entered the historical record? This project will advance the historiography for northern Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in new directions and contribute to methodological discussions in ethnohistory, cultural geography, and environmental history.
Mapping the Indian Bay Path in Sturbridge, MA (Ric Skinner)
A recent project of Ric Skinner's was researching and mapping a pre-Colonial Indian Bay Path through what is now Sturbridge, MA -- see the final report. The principal reference for this project was Levi Badger Chases book The Bay Path and Along the Way published in 1919. Chase provides a detailed account of his travels along the Bay Path in the late 19th century to document its route from near Boston to the Connecticut River. A key document was the actual field map used by Chase to sketch the Bay Paths location.
Listed by continent first, then subdivisions where applicable