Peter Bol, Suzanne Blier Receive NEH Grant Award for WorldMap Development
IQSS affiliates, Professors Bol and Blier, have been named recipients of a $320K award from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Digital Humanities Implementation Grant for their proposal on “Extending WorldMap to Make It Easier for Humanists and Others to Find, Use, and Publish Geospatial Information”. This work is supported by technical staff at the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA), especially Ben Lewis who is the chief architect and project manager of the WorldMap project. Administrative staff at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) have also been instrumental in providing assistance.
Bol and Blier’s two-year project will enhance the current WorldMap platform, making it easier for the general public to find and use a key class of interactive maps called “map services.” While millions of interactive maps exist, there is not yet a complete index allowing for ease of searchability. Bol and Blier’s further development of WorldMap aims to correct this dearth of functionality by making interactive map layers less complicated to find and use from within any online mapping application. The primary objective of the project is to allow for the observance of human civilization’s development in spatial context. The WorldMap project also seeks to take advantage of the knowledge of others, thereby enhancing mapping interests, and to create a sustainable and scalable platform from which students and scholars can participate in creating and sharing any spatially represented work.
