Philadelphia Directories

This article, on page 8 of the August 2004 edition of the short-lived newspaper The Philadelphia Independent, covered the creation of the 18th Century Philadelphia website (under Websites, at left).

In this 2010 article Amy Hillier, creator of The Philadelphia Negro GIS project (at left under Websites) and participant in the Future Foundations symposium (also above), discusses the great potential of historical GIS, but also the barriers to its more widespread use.

This link leads you to the 2005 issue of the journal Historical Geography. This particular issue was a thematic issue, devoted completely to historical GIS, and it contains many articles.

This link leads you to a thematic issue of Social Science History (Vol. 24, No. 3, Autumn, 2000) which is devoted entirely to historical GIS.

An article on historical GIS, by Amy Hillier in Pennsylvania Legacies, the magazine of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

This is William Theriault's article introducing the West Virginia GeoExplorer Project, which offers historical GIS resources for Jefferson County, West Virginia.

This website is one of the earliest attempts to map Philadelphia directories. An article about its creation appeared in the August 2004 issue of The Philadelphia Independent, p.8.

An interactive map of the land now called West Philadelphia, mapped out by owner in the year 1777.

To quote its self-description, "The purpose of the Greater Philadelphia GeoHistory Network is to gather geographic materials useful for the study of historic Philadelphia and its region. This site contains thousands of old maps, property atlases, city directories, industrial site surveys, and other items documenting the history and development of the city from the 1600s through today."

This was a two-day symposium at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia about the geography-based study of history. This link provides the lineup of presentations at the symposium, many of which have associated download links of their materials.

"A web-based property and social indicators information system used by city agencies and community based organizations throughout Philadelphia," according to its own description. This form of Geographic Information System project essentially does for the present what early directory studies aim to do for the past, and is useful in many areas of modern policy.

This is another project that Dr. Hillier has worked on. It describes itself as "a neighborhood and cultural history project focused on South Philadelphia and Northern Liberties" which includes "static GIS maps and an interactive mapping system that allows current and former residents to share stories about their neighborhoods."

This is Dr. Amy Hillier's extensive application of historical GIS to W. E. B. DuBois's 1896 study The Philadelphia Negro.

This project is described in William Theriault's article about it.

This project, called "Cowpaths" after the legend that the crooked streets of Boston were laid out following cow paths, is the most sophisticated historical GIS project mapping directory entries.

The site explains, "Cowpaths is a map-based tool for discovering image and directory information and then plotting it on a map. You can also discover names, occupations, and images in Cowpaths and find them in the directories and images in the Tufts Digital Library or at the Bostonian Society."

This 2002 compilation is one of the few books published to date about the use of GIS to study history.

This compilation publishes the papers presented at a historical GIS conference held at the Newberry Library in Chicago in March of 2004. Anne Kelly Knowles of the University of Maine and Hillier of the University of Pennsylvania are two of the foremost proponents and practitioners of the study of history by place.

This book makes extensive use of maps and historical GIS to explain the decline of the city of St. Louis, Missouri. More information can be found in Amy Hillier's review.

This National Public Radio story is about a group called The Food Trust which pushes for more supermarkets in poor urban areas. In its campaign for state funding for more Philadelphia supermarkets, TFT used historical GIS maps created by Amy Hillier based on W.E.B. Dubois's 1896 work The Philadelphia Negro.

These videos, uploaded by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is Part I of the symposium on Technological Innovations in the Humanities at The National Library of Israel, January 16 and 17, 2013.

These videos are the three parts of a talk given by map collector David Rumsey, who has put his collection online of over seventy thousand maps dating from the sixteenth century to the present era.