Historical Election Maps and Open Mapping Research

Open access publishing is great, but what if you can’t capture your research in words? Over at the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, Jeffery Young reports that in order to expand the reach and accessibility of their historical elections mapping project, digital historians at the University of Richmond moved their data from an in-house system to two platforms familiar to many web surfers: Google Maps and Google Earth.

The election maps for today’s results aren’t likely to change until after dinner time, but until then, you can explore what happened in previous elections going back to 1980. The original U of R site has data stretching back to 1840.

The project demonstrates the immense power of using free mapping utilities for presenting academic research. Science Progress took the same route in building its map project tracking research on the human toll of climate change.

But Young’s point isn’t just about communicating and collecting research–it’s about thinking of open formats like Google’s mapping system (which stores data in a special flavor of the eXtensible Markup Laguage, or XML, called KML) as new frameworks that can shape the research product itself. He asks whether open platforms like Google should be the tools of choice or whether home-grown systems are the better way to go.

The time, effort, and expertise necessary to build custom a mapping system are just some of the reasons to think about open systems that boast an every-increasing number of customizable features. But another consideration is accessibility. In-house systems, or ones built on expensive, professional geographic information system platforms, may not allow for easy information sharing, third-party mashups, or even visibility to non-academic readers.

So would it make sense to consider stipulating that some map-based research end up in an open, accessible format? The current National Institutes of Health policy on open-access publishing mandates that research funded with NIH dollars published in peer-reviewed journals must also be submitted to the PubMed database within 12 months. An agency like the National Science Foundation could experiment with providing incentives or tools to research grantees doing mappable work to provide their research in open formats. What do you think?

Tags: Climate Change, environment, Internet

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