Railroads and the making of modern America
Railroad development constituted one of the earliest global processes of social change. The records of this process are embedded in an extremely wide range of data sources, including trade journals, newspapers, maps, timetables, pamphlets, census data, photographs, and railroad records, which makes a large scale analysis of such data very difficult.
The project will develop a web-based framework for integrating spatio-temporal historical data from diverse sources for correlation, analysis, and visualization, and will focus in particular on the topics of railroad-related employment and mobility, and the environmental impact of railroad development.