Visualizing the Schwartz Map Collection

When Seymour I. Schwartz died in August 2020, his estate bequeathed the Schwartz Collection of North American Maps, 1500-1800 to UVA. These 210 maps enhance already strong collections in early American cartography, creating a windfall for the study of early Atlantic history and culture. My digital portal to the collection will feature interactive, high-resolution images of each of the maps, scholarly descriptions, comprehensive bibliographies, and dynamic visualizations that make the most of ArcGIS tools. This portal will be a critical resource for students in four courses I offer at UVA: Maps in World History (HIST 2212), Colonial British America (HIUS 3022), Workshop in Digital Map History (HIUS 3501), and Historical Geospatial Visualization (HIST 5501)--a course that served as an elective for the graduate DH certificate. Maps are best understood as voices in broader conversations rather than as singular objects. In other words, we get the most out of our study of cartography by joining maps together in research collections rather than examining them one-by-one. Created with ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online, these resources will be displayed on ESRI’s remarkable (and improving) visualization platform: ArcGIS Storymaps. Above all, researchers who engage with any map in the collection will also discover new opportunities to jump to other maps and topics that open up new avenues of exploration. The Schwartz Map Collection Portal will become a model for online digital map scholarship serving UVA students and the larger, global community of scholars.