instituteRice

Developed by Axis Maps in collaboration with the Spatial Studies Lab, instituteRice is an online mapping platform that illustrates the evolution of the Rice University campus, as it existed as well as it has since been imagined. Primary sources from the Woodson Research Center, such as photographs, historical maps, and campus plans, will be located temporally and spatially while their associated visual and geographic data will be integrated across a number of databases (including an open-access digital library of images, a geographic information system, an open source relational database, and a content delivery web service). The relationship between the various project elements will produce a web environment where qualitative and quantitative data are simultaneously loaded from an API, rendered across platforms, customized in many views, and probed by users in a system that supports multiple and interconnected expressions of diverse data sources. Rice University's campus is, in fact, particularly well suited to being captured in such a web map environment considering the many versions it has initially undergone and how it has progressively grown since its inauguration. Scaled down into a mobile app, the Rice community will be able to walk about the campus while visualizing it as it once was. Alums, in particular, will be able to use this temporally accurate map to contribute and store their memories (e.g., Name, Class, Memory text, Date, Photo). In its first iteration, the project will focus on the history of the campus, the organizing of its architectural archives, and the mapping of its evolution between 1908 and 1912.