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.
2024-2025 Update
For the 2024-2025 academic year, I have received internal funding at Butler University to complete the beta stage of this project and have an undergraduate researcher contribute to this work.
Cole Himmelheber is a junior at Butler University, majoring in History with a minor in Classics. He is completing an honors thesis on the social lives of pirates and pirate culture in North Carolina, and is also the Lead Intern for the Ancient Mediterranean Cultures and Archeology Lab.
Questions? Comments? Interested in this project? Please reach out to me at [mnebiolo] [@] [butler.edu]!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.