Thursday, November 26, 2009

Mapping Heritage Resources in Edmonton

Recently my fellow students and I have been discussing data mining and its implications to public historians. One of the articles we discussed was Dan Cohen's blog post What Americans Did on September 11, which in essence is an explanation of how he created a simple map using Google Earth to represent regions of the US, and whether residents prayed or watched CNN on 9/11 using information from the September 11 Digital Archive.

This, among other things, led my classmate Catherine Caughell to create a map of her own, which she posted on her blog. She did such a great job that I really wanted to try it myself, hence this post.

I used the Inventory and Register of Historic Resources in Edmonton as a data set, which is available on the City of Edmonton's website. This document includes the City's register of designated resources, the resources that have been recognized on the inventory, and resources that have been demolished.

Using this data set I spent a few minutes with Google Maps and Batchgeocode.com to map out the locations of the City's designated heritage resources.


View City of Edmonton Designated Heritage Resources in a larger map

The above results represent only an hour or so of work, and now that I know the basics, maps I create in the future should take even less time.

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