What is VCP?
“Visualizing Colonial Philadelphia” is a digital exhibit I created in tandem with my dissertation research. While working on my project, I became very interested in the process of visualizing early American space. The maps of the period piqued my interest, and I was curious how contemporary computational programs could help me understand and visualizing early Philadelphia in a more complete, or novel, way.
I was also stuck on the concept of “urban” that historians often use to define early colonial cities. This project is a way for me to engage with and support the arguments that Philadelphia was not truly an urban space, and I try to resituate what urban meant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
“Visualizing Colonial Philadelphia” attempts to examine both of these ideas as a short exhibit to allow for educators, academics, and students of all levels to use it.
Image: A portion of Map of Philadelphia and Parts Adjacent by Nicholas Scull, 1777. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Digital Library.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.