Conference Agenda

In this paper we provide an overview of the ongoing 2025 NEH Community Deep Mapping Institute. The NEH Community Deep Mapping institute is a hybrid 12-month virtual and in-person institute running from January 2025 through December 2025.

The Institute has been focusing on expanding the scope and practice of deep mapping by integrating public-facing and transdisciplinary scholarship into historical archaeology, historical geography and the spatial humanities. The Institute’s aim is to move from the established theories and concepts of deep mapping towards developing a foundation of practice with a specific emphasis on supporting community histories. The Institute includes 61 fellows from 9 project teams from across the America’s, representing over a 15 academic disciplines and professional heritage/public history fields. This paper will review the institute’s progress to date and the lessons learned by both institutes' hosts and fellows.

Entirely surrounded by Detroit, Hamtramck is a small Muslim-majority city with a long history of welcoming foreign-born immigrants, who make up 40% of Hamtramck’s population today. This presentation describes how our Hamtramck-based deep mapping project, now in its fourth year, has supported the strengthening of collaboration between the authors, the Hamtramck Historical Museum, Ukrainian American Archives and Museum, and a growing group of community stakeholders.

The Hamtramck Explorer is the first deep map to successfully integrate archaeological, historical, and geospatial data. This free, web-based deep map features a rich, interactive digital atlas on the front end supported by a powerful Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure (HSDI) on the back end. Spanning 150 years of Hamtramck’s history, the ultimate purpose of the Hamtramck Explorer is to preserve historical and archaeological information, to support research, and to foster storytelling by a community struggling with the ongoing effects of long-term disinvestment and deindustrialization.

Through the NEH Community Deep Mapping Institute, the Femme Beings Project examines the interconnectedness of women engaged in sex work and their environment, in the Potomac Quarter-- a designated red-light district in Detroit. Our multi-dimensional, interactive map explores how these spaces intersect and shape the social landscape of the area between 1880 and 1920. Historical archival materials on individual women labeled as “prostitutes” were combined with research from artifacts to create a dynamic map of the Potomac Quarter that visualizes a rich, storied neighborhood near the riverfront in Detroit. The map visualizes patterns and continuity within the collected data and focuses on the connection between brothel locations and other essential businesses that would directly support sex work or others that benefit indirectly, and allows us to bring to light the lived experience of women preserving their experiences within the broader social history of Detroit.

The profound history of Charleston, SC is recorded in the archaeological remains, structures, documents, and family histories of the region, curated and studied by dozens of private, public, and civic organizations. Cooperation between these organizations is substantial, though efforts would be improved by a centralized repository to explore the abundant, interwoven sources and encourage partnerships between organizations and the community. Furthermore, African American communities have often been absent or significantly underrepresented from the historical record and narrative.

The Spatial History of Charleston (SHOC) is a geospatial platform designed to address these concerns. Adhering to deep mapping principles, the spatial database and interface is designed to integrate datasets under separate development by multiple partners and to create functionality in collaboration with community members and broader stakeholders. SHOC democratizes the region’s historical information, encouraging engagement with community stakeholders to foster more inclusive access, realigning the historical narrative of the region.

The Red River Valley of the North was shaped by glacial Lake Agassiz, is characterized by flat terrain and fertile soils, and features Indigenous and settler sites, historic rail lines, the growth of small urban centers, Bonanza Farms, and rural homesteading communities. The Glacier, Prairie, Farm Deep Map centers the region’s rich history of human-landscape interaction and is working towards the incorporation of data from multiple sources including geological and environmental surveys, historic maps and aerial photographs, oral histories, archival materials, and archaeological data from a multi-component site excavated in the 1980s and an active farmstead study. While the project is in the early phases of prototype development, this paper will report of the progress that has been made during the Deep Mapping Institute run out of Michigan Technological University in 2025.

Pauliceia 2.0 is a collaborative mapping project launched in 2018, charting São Paulo's transformation into a modern industrial metropolis between 1870 and 1940. It functions as an open science experiment, welcoming diverse collaborators to contribute data and valuing user feedback for continuous improvement.

Primarily utilized by academics, Pauliceia 2.0 is now expanding. Its third phase, initiated in November 2024, seeks to engage community groups to integrate their unique historical knowledge, enriching the city's narrative beyond official and academic perspectives. This expansion is supported by a crucial partnership with the Municipal Historical Archive of São Paulo, which acts as an intermediary with community collection networks.

Further strengthening the project, the team's participation in the NEH Community Deep Mapping Institute has provided essential training and fostered valuable dialogue. Pauliceia 2.0 also partners with the Aeronautics Technological Institute and Emory University.

There is ongoing discourse about utilizing participatory and alt GIS to address power imbalances rooted in colonial frameworks that privileged land as property over traditional Indigenous stewardship. Such inequalities are exacerbated by the systematic exclusion of Indigenous and descendant communities from creating and managing digital infrastructures that visually and spatially represent their histories. This paper examines the challenges in putting this ambition into practice through the construction of an HSDI, and explores the link between digital sovereignty—the right to control digital narratives—and deep mapping. Our HSDI visualizes Indigenous and Black geographies on the Caribbean island of Dominica where overlapping sovereignties and legal frameworks continue to assert dominance over space and its representation, hindering communities from accessing much of the information—spatial or otherwise—that informed the administration of their land and histories. Ultimately,we argue that participatory GIS and data sovereignty serve as catalysts to combat the legacies of territorial and digital colonialism.

In the 20^th century, Sumter, South Carolina, emerged as a lumber capital, fostering diverse wood product industries. Unlike many Southern towns focused on textiles, Sumter leveraged old-growth hardwoods, supporting furniture factories, cooperages, veneer and finish manufacturers. These businesses’ century-long influence on design, labor, race relations, and environmental change remains largely unexamined in public memory. Through university-community partnerships, we are creating a webmap that integrates spatial, historical, and material culture datasets that locate timberlands, industrial sites, and associated social spaces revealing the industries’ economic and racial dynamics. We experiment with new forms of interactive content, such as 3D models of furniture linked geospatially to specific factories, machines, and even the forests from which the wood originated. Mapping Forest to Furniture reconstructs a significant but overlooked industrial-urban history while also presenting a model for digital storytelling, integrating environmental, labor, and design histories. (https://digital.library.sc.edu/woodbasket/)