You know the old saying, “when you are holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail”?

Our team wields a hammer, and we take the responsibility seriously.

Much of the historical record has a spatial component, but our goal is not to map the whole archive. Instead, we choose our nails carefully. In this phase of the project, we are working with collections: with groups of documents, records, maps, or narratives, that are structured the same way or describe the same sort of places.

Our “nails” look something like this: