GIS – Geographic Information Systems – is a massive field; we’re just scratching the surface here.
But it’s possible to actually create real maps that no one has made before pretty easily by drawing together elements from various map layers online.
Key terms
The industry standard is ArcGIS, made by the company ESRI. It’s expensive! That’s about the only downside. If you take a GIS class, they often use Arc.
QGIS is free, and not all that bad. We’re using it so you get used to something you’ll be able to keep using without a site license.
There are a variety of web mapping technologies that are taking different areas of the humanities and journalism by storm. Hypercities builds on some of the Google platform; Stanford/Orbis builds on D3.js, which is hard to use (requires coding in Javascript) but extremely powerful for interactive maps. It’s what, most notably, any map you’ve seen on the New York Times in the last few years uses.
Right click on a layer to examine it. The two most important options are:
Georectification is the process of warping a map so that it can be used
Some examples of various sorts:
Abby Mullen has posted a list of instructions for georectification online
The process of matching places in English (or Latin, or whatever) to latitude-longitude coordinates you can place on a map.
Example: Mitch Fraas and Ben Schmidt, Mapping the State of the Union