Bringing the American Revolution to life through maps

Academics, reseachers, and the public have an all-new, interactive way to experience a collection of over 900 maps of North America made between 1750 and 1800 through ARGO Maps. To celebrate the United States' 250th anniversary and Mount Vernon’s growing map collection, George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center envisioned a curated website that would tell the story of the American Revolution through maps.

Visual discovery

People wanted to explore maps through compelling and intuitive interfaces.

Interest-specific exploration

Topics such as map materials, creators, geographic areas, and historical themes were critical points of engagement.

Practical use

People needed access to material for research, teaching and personal projects.

These insights shaped the design, ensuring multiple pathways to explore the collection--whether people wanted to dive deep or explore casually.

And it was clear our team wouldn't be the only ones with these questions. We discovered in our own confusion that the interface and content needed to help people get a sense of what the Revolution was, and at the same time not get in the way of the researchers and academics who needed specific answers quickly and easily.

Defining Pathways of Exploration

With a clearer understanding of who the people are and their needs, the different pathways of exploration needed to be defined. Luckily working with a team of passionate historians and map experts who were willing to think out of the box, made it easy. Explorations started using data-accurate wireframes, iterating often and continuously returning to the drawing board to find new ideas and improve current ones.

The advanced search system needed to support all the different ways the data set could be explored. Site visitors can start with a search term or just start by viewing all the maps and paring down by subjects, years, empires and other facets, as well as features like hand-coloring or marginalia to find just the right maps. (Unfortunately the live project doesn't support advanced searching at this time.)

When people explore any type of interactive map, they like to explore where they are located or places they'd like to visit. With this thought came an interface to explore the American Revolution Maps through a map itself. Could site visitors explore the data set by a location of interest? By map size?

Beyond geographic details, site visitors can engage with map elements, such as the intricate cartouches along the borders, and historical themes like the animals of the era, as well as people and languages.

Each map can be explored in detail supplemented with meta-data to helped people understand the context of each map.

Working on ARGO maps was all about iterative, data-driven design and thinking about different ways to humanize a once static collection of maps. Now a over 1000 maps can be explored by various ways and level of depth through ARGO maps.