JISC

This project will integrate a vast collection of textual, geographical and numerical data to allow for the visual presentation of the railroads over time, concentrating initially on the Great Plains and NE USA.

This project aims to integrate large-scale data from various repositories with other types of relevant data on the railroad system of the USA, already assembled by the project directors, such as historical GIS (Geographical Information Systems), worker payrolls, passenger traffic tables, and other data drawn from original sources.

This will demonstrate how scholars can work with diverse data on a large-scale social process, such as railroad development, and develop useful tools for spatio temporal visualization of these data and the relationships among them. It is intended to open the project repository for scholars to submit and test data, as well as to query our collection. Because a very useful framework model and a major dissemination web site for the project (http://railroads.unl.edu) has already been developed at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the project partners are ready to develop the computational technologies that will lead scholars in new directions.