About this site

In pursuit of finding ways to better integrate text and images into coherent narratives, the brilliant students of the Cornell University undergraduate course HIST 22391: From Terra Incognita to Territories of Nation-States: Early American History in Two Dozen Maps learned and explored the exhibit tool Exhibit.so to create beautiful multimedia exhibitions displaying themes across historical maps of the United States.

Along with becoming familiar with the basics of IIIF, web hosting, and image servers, the project creators learned how to search for IIIF manifests in repositories of digital maps, how to identify a Manifest URL from an info.json manifest file, and how to use the Exhibit.so web tool to display IIIF maps in a compelling and novel way.

Students who went to the Cornell University Library Map Collection for maps or identified maps online that were not IIIF-compatible reached out to the CoLab to have manifests created for their maps. This site holds all of the IIIF manifests and images processed by the Digital CoLab for the course. Manifests are ordered alphabetically and the labels will be the same as the individual image title in whatever repository the image is from. Maps are drawn from various places (included in the metadata), including the Cornell University Library Map Collection.

All credit for projects goes to the indivdiual students, including Banafsheh Hussain, Grant Whitman, Alexis Ahn, and Enoch Parmar, who worked hard to research and present their maps. The CoLab thanks these students for graciously allowing their projects to be displayed on this site for future use in instruction and outreach. Please see their original works on the Projects page.