LibGuides: ENGL 3223: New York in Ten Objects: Maps and GIS

Research Librarian

She/Her

Email Me

Contact:

Meredith Wisner
Research & Instruction Librarian for the Arts
Office: 306 Milstein

Mon & Tues: Zoom only
Wed - Fri: In-person/Zoom

212.854.7652

Subjects: Architecture, Art History, Dance, Film Studies, First-Year Writing, Music, Theatre

Empirical Reasoning Center (ERC)

If you need assistance organizing, analyzing, or visualizing data sets, please visit the Empirical Reasoning Center (ERC). The Empirical Reasoning Center (ERC) helps faculty, students, and alumnae engage critically with data - quantitative, qualitative and spatial.

Their website contains software tutorials and workshop tutorials. You can meet with staff of the ERC virtually by making an appointment or during walk-in hours.

Maps

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
David Rumsey Historical Map Collection focuses on 18th and 19th century North and South American cartographic materials and includes atlases, globes, school geographies, maritime charts, and a variety of separate maps including pocket, wall, and manuscript maps.

Digital Sanborn maps 1867-1970
Includes more than 660,000 Sanborn maps charting the growth and development of more than 12,000 American towns and cities. Includes textual information on construction details (for example, steel beams or reinforced walls), building use (ranging from symbols for generic terms such as stable, garage, and warehouse to names of owners of factories and details on what was manufactured in them; in the case of large factories or commercial buildings, even individual rooms and the uses to which they were put are recorded on the maps), and other building features (such as pipelines, railroads, wells, dumps, and heavy machinery).

Lehman Social Sciences Library Map Collection
The Lehman Social Sciences Library Map Collection at Columbia University has various types of maps, including topographic, aeronautical, thematic, nautical, and geological maps.
Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America
Mapping Inequality introduces viewer to the records of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation on a scale that is unprecedented. Here you can browse more than 150 interactive maps and thousands of "area descriptions." These materials afford an extraordinary view of the contours of wealth and racial inequality in Depression-era American cities and insights into discriminatory policies and practices that so profoundly shaped cities that we feel their legacy to this day.

Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division/New York Public Library (NYPL): This is one of the world's premier map collections in terms of size, scope, unique holdings, diversity and intensity of use. Established in 1898, holdings include more than 433,000 sheet maps and 20,000 books and atlases published between the 15th and 21st centuries. The collections range from the global to the local scale and support the learning and research needs of a wide variety of users. Here are some local collections:

Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas
Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas visualizes Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s transformations during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Drawing on 1850, 1880, and 1910 census data, it shows how migration, residential, and occupational patterns shaped the city. The Digital Atlas breaks new ground by locating each person counted in the Census at their home address, sometimes before the street grid was even established. This is a living project that will expand to include all five boroughs up to the 1940 census.
New York City Atlases & Land Guides
This research guide details historical resources available from Columbia's Avery Library and the New York Public Library.
NYC Open Data
You can search by type to find maps.
NYC Then & Now
NYC Then & Now shows New York City from above as it’s grown and changed over time. Search any address and use the tools at right to swipe or fade between decades.
OldNYC
Allows you to explore historical photos from the NYPL’s Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s collection. Photographs are attached, by location, to points on a map of all five boroughs of New York City.
Social Explorer
Helps you visually analyze and understand demographic, election, health, environment and other data through the use of interactive maps and data reports.

NYC spatial data links

Try searching in your favorite search engine for your geographic area plus "shapefile". Or use these sites to locate files.

GIS and Spatial Data: New York City and State
This is from a guide by GIS/Metadata Librarian Eric Glass that highlights resources available from the Columbia University Libraries as well as from other sources. "The effort here is to identify resources that are already in an acceptable format for use in a GIS application."
IPUMS USA
Boundary files, maps, component lists, and relationship files for geographic areas identified in IPUMS-USA samples.
National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS)
The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides population, housing, agricultural, and economic data, along with GIS-compatible boundary files, for geographic units in the United States from 1790 to the present.