FAQs

We aim to answer all the following questions over 2019-2020. In some cases we know there are answers but haven’t yet documented them, or we need to do more research. In some cases we will simply give direction to easy solutions that already exist, while in others we will develop solutions. Questions we have not yet documented solutions for are greyed out.

General

The best place to begin with TLCMap is the self paced Guide.

It should take only an hour or a few hours for the average non-technical computer user, depending on how much you want to do, and how much experience you have. It really won’t take long to do some simple searches, and to then create an account and put a few dots on a map.

Take a look at some examples of maps people have created with TLCMap.

There are now countless digital humanities mapping projects to be found on the web. Some of the early maps that influenced the creation of TLCMap are:

Anterotesis provides a long list of geohumanities projects generally: http://anterotesis.com/wordpress/mapping-resources/dh-gis-projects/

You can use the search function to find places in many varied ways, such as by fuzzy matching, or limiting to a certain locality. See the Guide for how to do nuanced and faceted searches within and across both official gazetteers and humanities layers. Some examples can indicate how useful this can be:

  • User contributions include many obscure Australian places you are unlikely to find anywhere else, such as the names of old homesteads or missions, which can be very useful for Australian history.
  • Fuzzy search can be used to catch variant spellings, especially useful for historical and Indigenous names.
  • Searching for anything in a particular area can lead to serendipitous discoveries of related information you didn’t previously know existed.

Creating layers and multilayers can be used in different ways for research. It’s a good idea to start with an understanding of why you want a map. This can determine whether:

i) You have already answered a research question want to create a map to illustrate the results. Eg: You already know there were bushfires in Gippsland in a certain historical period, but to present a history of bushfires in Gippsland, you want a map of them, perhaps linked to information about each one. You don’t need to map bushfires in order to find out they were in Gippsland, but may be an important way to illustrate your findings, “As you can see on the map and timeline, bushfires this time impacted many homesteads in the region leading to…”. You just need to select the relevant bushfires and map them.

ii) You have research question which can only be answered by mapping the information. Eg: You don’t know where bushfires most impacted people in history. To find out you need to map them and observing the intensity or frequency of their occurrence in different places, perhaps by mapping newspaper reporting of them. This answers your question, perhaps by showing you they were especially intense in Gippsland in a certain period, and other places at other times. To answer a question you need to get a comprehensive set of information, not just a curated selection of it.

iii) Speculative play. You may just want to manipulate, combine and explore information to see what you find.

In practice research may be an ongoing iteration of all three. Or there may be subtle overlaps (Eg: you may need a selected map of the bushfires in Gippsland to answer the question whether they would have effected certain homesteads at certain times).

Some of the ways creating maps can be used for research are:

  • To create an interactive user interface to information, for public engagement. It can be used as an illustration of your information, or subject area. Such as a map of where someone traveled, or where certain events happened.  It offers a way to present the wider evidence base for claims that are made in a publication.
  • To answer a research question. Maps can be created to see with your own eyes, or by mathematics, or a combination of both, the spatial and temporal patterns of the information that you were unaware of before. They can be used to show the material real world manifestations of social or mental phenomenon (such as where prejudice leads to people living on one side of the tracks). This may demonstrate or counter a finding or assumption, or reveal unexpected findings . This applies not only to creating maps of one kind of information, but combining maps of different information to see how they relate.
  • To create a research tool. The map can be created as a way of making data discoverable and navigable. It’s a way for other researchers to find and access information related to a place.

Digital productions, in the form of websites, software applications and datasets (TLCMap is all of these) are now recognised as publications or ‘non traditional outputs’ and so in an academic context should be cited as such. If you create a map layer your work also becomes citable. If you have carefully created a reliable dataset or layer, you should take the extra step of depositing it in a research data repository, and getting a DOI to ensure it is accessible, reliable and citable in the long term.

See the following sections on how to cite TLCMap and how to deposit TLCMap research data in a repository.

TLCMap does research and development for digital humanities mapping. TLCMap is a software infrastructure project, including a website with multiple applications and data for different purposes.

In a publication you may wish to reference:

  • the TLCMap infrastructure project and its website
  • the application used to work with information, such as Quick Coordinates
  • a specific layer or visualisation or other kind of data or content that you or another person has created.

Citing TLCMap example:

Time Layered Cultural Map University of Newcastle et al, https://docs.tlcmap.org (accessed 31/12/2023)

Citing a TLCMap application example:
How to cite TLCMap applications, such as Quick Coordinates.

Quick Coordinates Time Layered Cultural Map, https://quicktools.tlcmap.org/quickcoordinates.html (accessed 31/12/2023)

Citing TLCMap Content, such as map layers, data or visualisations:

Morgan, Fiannuala ’19th Century Australian Bushfire Reporting’, Time Layered Cultural Map, 31/01/2023 https://tlcmap.org/layers/170 (accessed 31/12/2023)

TLCMap does not aim to compete with any existing mapping or GIS systems and we don’t wish to replicate existing functionality too much. As most GIS systems are focused on science, commerce and government we aim to provide functionality that either makes it easier to work with Humanities and cultural information or develop new functionality that addresses our specific needs. This means that there are other systems you might find equally useful to get started with, or that already do advanced things that you can’t do in TLCMap. Our aim is to be interoperable so that it is easy to move information to and from other systems and TLCMap systems, depending on your projects specific needs, using open standards (KML, CSV, GeoJSON). Some commonly used systems are:

  • Google Earth (online or desktop) for easily adding points, lines and polygons on a map. While a great way to get started, and good for quick and simple maps, you are likely to run into limitations.
  • QGIS is a free desktop application for more advanced mapping, but it will require working through some online tutorials to learn how to use it. It also doesn’t create web maps.
  • Story Maps are a way to carefully curate text images and maps with each other for a sophisticated and interactive web reading experience. They may be created by various means, but can be expensive and difficult to archive and reproduce, and may depend on subscriptions.
  • Your institution may provide access to advanced GIS and mapping systems through subscriptions.

There are many ways to answer this, so here’s just a few points. Most GIS and mapping systems are designed for science, government or commerce. For example, it’s easy to find businesses using Google Maps, which is very useful, but you cannot as easily find all the culture that exists in those same streets, hills and creeks. Science produces highly structured well organised and precisely measured information because without it, the science is invalid. Science is limited to phenomena that is repeatable and measurable in this way. Humanities may use scientific methods but is not limited to the phenomena that can be studied with them, we need ways to deal with vagueness, ways to study outliers, ways to see relationships not only in terms of correlations of repeated and repeatable observations in a ceteris parabis experiment, but interactions between unique and highly complicated circumstances involving complex interactions. Time is usually an important factor, which is why we always factor the temporal dimension into our development – but time is not only dates. We also need to find ways to map journeys with and without dates, without and without quantities and cyclical time (still in development). We need to deal with maps that aren’t a proportionate picture of the world with latitude and longitude, but are stored in any media – pictures, stories, songs, dance, and so on.

The proposed ‘Time Layered Cultural Map (TLC Map)’ is intended to be infrastructure. An apt definition of infrastructure is “Infrastructure can be described as that which creates the conditions of possibility for certain kinds of activities.”1 TLC Map will provide and improve the conditions of possibility for digital mapping in the humanities.

The TLCMap approach is ‘No project without a platform and no platform without a project‘. This means we only work on software for project that makes re-usable functionality for other projects, and that we do not produce software without projects to prove it’s real-world usefulness (ie: no solutions looking for problems). In this way development is always driven by researchers needs, and makes digital mapping possible for us as a community.

  1. Brown, Susan; Clement, Tanya; Mandell, Laura; Verhoeven, Deb; Wernimont, Jacque Creating Feminist Infrastructure in the Digital Humanities DH2016 2016-03-06 http://dh2016.adho.org/static/data-copy/531.html

TLCMap was started with grant funding. We are implementing a plan to ensure ongoing maintenance funding while keeping TLCMap completely free for everyone, so that we do not depend on grants. This involves a modest contribution from a consortium of institutions. However we cannot make promises to retrain data in the same way an official research data repository can. TLCMap is for producing and making humanities and cultural map data on the web, but is not a data repository. Any work and data you put in to TLCMap can be easily downloaded in open standard formats, for import, use and display in other systems. As with any system, make sure you export and back up your information, and deposit research data in an official repository.

An adequate longevity plan is difficult in the absence of institutional support or commitment to post project maintenance for eResearch generally, including digital humanities, even though this would be a small cost to protect thousands or millions of dollars in investment. This absence appears to be the across the tertiary research sector. There are legitimate concerns that new systems won’t last long or that effort put in and data might be lost. We address these concerns in a variety of ways, and recommend actions you can take to be confident your research and work survives any eventuality. Ideally more funding would be available through further grants, partnerships and institutional support but we know this might not happen, so we have the following strategies to ensure work remains whether ‘TLCMap’ continues to exist or not:

  • Independant Systems and Software ‘Ecosystem’: Where ever possible we are developing on platforms that have an existence independent of our project, including finance and user communities. These systems will carry on without us.
  • Data export in standard format: It is a requirement of participating systems that data be exportable in standard, interoperable formats. Individual researchers will have exported and saved their work and will be able to utilise it, perhaps in degraded forms, in other systems, or continue development with it in different directions, perhaps including enhancements.
  • Open Source: Using open source systems mean they won’t suddenly disappear because someone forget to renew a subscription, licence agreements change, or the provider goes out of business or discontinues service. A the very least in the event of complete failure an open source system can be run up elsewhere and backed up data (you did export and back up your data didn’t you?) can be restored.
  • ROCrate: ROCrate is adopted as a standard for archiving research data. This especially addresses a need where information may be useful in the long term but project funding and institutional interest cannot continue to fund maintenance and upgrades. All TLCMap systems should enable export in ROCrate format.
  • Spread Risk: TLCMap is not about developing a new system that attempts to be all things for all people, and reproduces functionality, and so competes against established system. Rather than a single system that risks complete failure if it fails to be adopted, risk is spread across a diversity of development streams and established software platforms.
  • Research Data Deposit: Research data should be deposited in an official repository and registered with relevant bodies. This also helps others find it. If you ant to archive your data, refer to How to digitally archive TLCMap layers/multilayers in this guide.

Time

There are many ways we think and talk about time. We aim to make available ways to structure temporal information and visualise it for different circumstances such as:

  • journey (eg: a ship, or ships on a journey is at certain points at certain times. The data structure is a series of points with times or durations.)
  • serial (eg: a sequence of events where they happen in a certain order, but there is no specific date. We just want to see that one happens after another. Eg: “first go to Dudley, then to Merewhether, Dixon and Bar, and then on to Newcastle and finally Nobby’s”)
  • migration (quantities of movement between places. Eg: not just this or those ships going from here to there, but for example 200 people go from London to Sydney, and 150 to Melbourne in 1960, 300 to Sydney and 350 to Melbourne in 1961, 256 to Sydney and 132 to Melbourne in 1962, etc)
  • frontier (movement of lines and polygons, rather than movement of a point along them. Eg: the Western Front in WWI.)
  • stationary change (places which stay in one place but with multiple properties changing over time. Eg: cinemas don’t move but change between being cinemas and not being cinemas, change managers, changed from showing Hollywood to Greek and Italian films etc)
  • cyclical (things which repeat in a pattern with amounts of time between each. These may be concentric cycles at different scales. Eg: indigenous seasons.)
  • calendar (things which happen repeatedly at certain times, eg: train timetables)

Will will soon be implementing advanced features for handling mobility.

You can view any TLCMap layer as a timeline by selecting ‘Timeline’ from the ‘View Map’ options.

You can view any layer as a journey by selecting from the ‘View Map’ options. It will join a line to all the points on the map. You can choose whether to view the places simply in the order they appear, or by date. This means if you want to map a journey, all you need to do is create a layer with either the places in the right order, or with a date for each place. We will also soon be adding more advanced features for mobility.

Processing and Metrics

We will soon be releasing a feature for automatically mapping uploading texts, with a way to correct errors in finding places.

In TLCMap navigate to a layer and click the Analyse button for statistical and clustering options.

Images, Virtuality and Visualisation

Yes. If you add a place to a layer, or edit a place you have already added, you can upload an image to it. When someone clicks the dot on the map, they will see the image.

Note that you can only attach one image to each place.

You could add an image to a place as an illustration, for example a picture of a building that was here, or the person who was involved in the event that happened here.

You could also map an image collection, each image might relate to a place, so if you put them on a map you will have many points, each with an image, perhaps some in the same place. The user can discover and navigate these at will. Other links attached to that record may link back to your website for the full set of information, a page in which this image appears, it’s source, a story about it, or the project or institution that curates this collection.

At present images can only be uploaded to a place one by one through the user interface. If you would like to load images in bulk, such as an institutional collection, please contact TLCMap and we’ll see what we can do.

The following provide georeferencing tools that are free to some extent:

In TLCMap you can add a story using the ‘Description’ section. You can also upload a picture to any place. If you want to create a story with many images and maps, you should create a web page for your website, or use software that is specifically for that. TLCMap is for associating information with a place. One way of thinking of it is that if you have images and stories and any other information, you can attach coordinates to each of those items. They will each appear on the map, and someone could click on any of them in any order. If they are mapped individually, you can look at sub sections of them in different ways, depending on what data you put in – such as just the people’s birth places, or just their destinations, or just the buildings, or just the watercourses, not the land features, etc. That can be a good way for people to wander around information. Another way to think of this is to use TLCMap just to create the map that you will then embed in your web page, that might also present things in a certain order with context. You could create a map of places, and a map of all the people, or of certain types of events, which the information on your website explains or introduces. At present uploading pictures is limited to one at a time, so contact us if you want to map a large collection.