Overview

As part of an exhibition at the Indiana University Lilly Library entitled The Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861 curated by historian, Konstantin Dierks, a digital counterpart to this physical exhibit was also created under Dierks' guidance that includes an interactive, temporal and geospatial visualization exploring globalization. The visualization tracks several data points or “facets” about U.S. interventions in the rest of the globe, from diplomatic missions to stationed military squadrons. As Dierks describes, it provides a tool for scholars and students to investigate how “the United States, no longer swaddled within the British empire, sought to recalibrate its interaction with the wider world as an independent nation.” This repository contains the code-base for the interactive mapping tool, described in more detail below.

Tools and Technologies

The interactive map is built using Leaflet, an open-source JavaScript library for the creation of interactive maps. The data set collected by Dierks is currently fed from a Google spreadsheet. A custom Python script initially developed by Bryan Brown and further refined by Shaun Akhtar was created to automatially initialize the interactibe map based on the Google spreadsheet, including the rendering of the historcial base maps.

The technical documentation is still a work in progress, but it is currently mainatined as a Google doc. As the documentation is finalized, it will migrate to live permamently as part of this repo.