A Digital Library: Collection for Visually Exploring United States Demographic and Social Change

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This collaborative project between CUNY and UCLA is a collection of web-based materials that will enable depiction and exploration of growth and social change in the United States since its beginnings. It is accessible to students from elementary through postgraduate school, library users, the media, and all others interested in relating a variety of demographic and other data to one another. It is being implemented so a high level of technical sophistication is not required of users to visualize the results in the form of maps and charts, to download the data for further analysis, and to relate the data to specific issues in the social sciences.Specifically the following elements will be part of the project:1) Census data and maps at the county level from 1790 through 2000, which depict the sweeping change. 2) Census data and maps at the tract level, beginning with the largest cities in 1910 and expanding until 1990, when they become available for the entire country.3) Data from the street and road layer of the Census, which are part of the national map of the United States and used to define Census tracts and other Census geography.4) Available images and text that can be geographically located and related to the underlying demography. The images recorded by the award winning photojournalist Camilo Vergara, who has documented areas of the large cities for the past 30 years, illustrate the demographic material. The demographics, in turn, provide contextual information for his photos.5) A system for visually displaying and manipulating the maps, data, images, and texts. This effort draws on several other projects, including, the National Historic Geographic Information System (NHGIS), Visualizing and Exploring United States Urban and Rural Social Change, 1790-2000 --Interactive Multimedia and Web Based Tools (both funded by NSF), and the Great American History Machine, as well digitization efforts in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Chicago and elsewhere.In short, the digital library serves as a demographic, geographic and social grid for the United States. The grid also can accommodate the addition of other materials on land use, transportation, health care, and the like. Examples are provided, especially for the major metropolitan areas of New York and Los Angeles. All materials are developed in standard formats and integrated with a dynamic mapping system and an interactive multimedia viewer to provide a user-friendly interface. Materials are freely available for interactive use, downloading, sharing and enhancement on publicly accessible servers at UCLA and CUNY. Also, they are being made available to other digital repositories. The NHGIS at the Minnesota Population Center is distributing the materials, which ultimately will be archived along with the NHGIS materials at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.