An 18th Century map of the continential United States with red, yellow, and green details. Though California is listed on this early map, there are no northwestern states and much of the south is defined as New Mexico and Georgia.

If this is a beginning, then what's next?

This project represents the beginning stages of a much larger-scale endeavor, which unfortunately is beyond our current capacity. We believe that more meaningful and interesting analytics could emerge through further harnessing the power of GIS data and building more links between these two interconnected datasets (treaty and map metadata).

With a much larger collection of images and much larger datasets, our analysis tools would grow exponentially more powerful.

Future capture and analysis of textual data could be automated using a Python script and command-line to scrape text and build .txt files directly as well as geocoordinate location information without a GUI.

This project would greatly benefit from a partnership with an institution that houses a large collection of historical maps in need of digitization - ideally, a more automated way to ingest content into our data model could eventually be integrated into the standard workflow for historic map digitization.

We would love to use xml markup to embed more layers of our extensive metadata records into these webpages, and we are very interested in integrating OpenStreetMap data to further enhance our visualizations.

We are open to collaborations and feedback. See ABOUT US for contact information.

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This project was developed in a graduate information studies course at UCLA in the fall of 2018.

Imperial Eyes acknowledges the Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar (Los Angeles basin, So. Channel Islands) and are grateful to have the opportunity to work for the taraaxatom (indigenous peoples) in this place. As a land grant institution, we pay our respects to Honuukvetam (Ancestors), Ahiihirom (Elders), and eyoohiinkem (our relatives/relations) past, present and emerging."

This territory acknowledgement and accompanying pronunciations are attributed to the UCLA World Arts and Cultures/Dance Department.

Creative Commons License with three cirular images: the first image depicts two c's to mean Creative Commons, the second is the figure of a human to request attribution, and the third is of a dollar sign with a slash through it to demonstrate that this is a non-commercial project.