This conference, sponsored by the Wires and Rails research project at the Neubauer Collegium, considered the research team’s work to construct GIS maps of United States telegraph offices and railroad stations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project worked with Zooniverse to set up a crowdsourcing platform to transcribe information from Western Union Tariff Books and The Official Guide to the Railway. The new communication GIS datasets enabled researchers to more precisely study the impact of communication networks on society, politics, government, and the economy.

Presenters

Samantha Blickhan (Zooniverse)

John Clegg (New York University)

Camilo Garcia-Jimeno (University of Pennsylvania)

Aaron M. Honsowetz (Bethany College)

Michael Weaver (University of Chicago)