The North American Missions Project culminated in 2004 with the appearance of French and Spanish Missions in North America, an ePublication of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative and the California Digital Library.  The co-authors of the publication (John Corrigan and Tracy Leavelle) had become interested in experimenting with the visualization and analysis of historical phenomena in spatial dimensions, particularly in the study of religion.  We compiled a database that documents every known Spanish and French mission site in colonial North America.  The database presents information on mission duration and location, American Indian groups associated with the mission, individual missionaries, population changes, commodity production, epidemics, and associated colonial institutions like towns and forts.  With TimeMap users can query the data in both spatial and temporal dimensions simultaneously and produce detailed analytical maps.  For example, users can create dynamic maps that reveal the emergence and decline of mission networks over time or they can create new map layers on digitized historic maps from New Spain or New France.

This presentation will describe the origins and development of the project and assess its value as a new source for the study of spatial histories, with special attention to the prospects for future projects that incorporate even richer material in more dynamic and layered presentations.