Problem Statement

The flow of time can cause us to forget what used to exist but no longer does. One way we deal with this is by keeping photos and pictures, a large quantity of which have been amassed over the course of human history. The problem that this project would address is that we sometimes neglect how landscapes have changed over time. Residents of modern-day Manhattan may not realize how radically different their zone is today from how it was in the days of the Native Americans. To tackle this problem, this project aims to give users an easy-to-use interface to explore how different regions have changed in appearence over time.

Approach

In this project, we would create a website where the user sees a map of the Earth and has a slider to set the date to a different point in time. When the user clicks on a point in the map, it will bring up a photo from a database that most closely matches the point in time and space that the user has selected.

Audience

Our audience would be people interested in understanding how landscapes change over time. This could include historians, environmentalists, and students. Research questions that this project can help answer are: What effects did the colonial expansion of the 17th Century have on the Americas? How is deforestation affecting the appearance of woodlands? How has industrialization impacted the appearance of different regions?

Skills Needed

This approach would require gathering thousands of images and labeling them with spatial and temporal information. It would thus require back-end programming skills and database technology knowledge. It would also require creating a responsive and attractive front-end and thus require knowledge of HTML5 and JQuery.