By John Corrigan and Tracy Leavelle, with Arthur
Remillard
Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
University
of California, Berkeley
Introduction
This Internet publication presents an assortment of data about
French and Spanish missions in North America. It displays that
data with reference to geographical coordinates.
The publication features a website that invites searches for
data about North American missions through a text based browser.
It also offers TimeMap time and place viewers to access that
data from within a visual map based environment. These means
provide a range of options for engaging the site, enabling users
to explore it in ways that will maximize their interaction depending
on their interests and technical capabilities, and with respect
to kinds of the cultural data and the scale of detail they require.
Background
French and Spanish Missions in North America emerged
out of a collaboration between the Electronic Cultural Atlas
Initiative at the University of California at Berkeley and The
Polis Center at Indiana-University-Purdue University at Indianapolis,
and has involved a large cast of researchers and technical specialists
from many universities.
The publication is focused on the missionary activities of Spanish
and French Roman Catholics in North America (north of present-day
Mexico) from the earliest mission settlements in the 1560s to
the collapse of the California mission system in the mid-nineteenth
century. The mission enterprise as it developed under the auspices
of various religious orders - Jesuits, Franciscans, Sulpicians,
and others - was a key component of Spanish and French strategy
for colonizing the New World. Some missions, including a number
established very early in the European colonization of North America,
survived for centuries, and remained viable communities even after
the removal of the French and Spanish who had founded them. Other
missions lasted only a short while, or waxed and waned haphazardly,
as power shifted between colonial authorities and Native Americans,
as epidemics came and went, and as missionaries were variously
emboldened or discouraged by their encounters with Indians. The
American landscape, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was defined
for Europeans by rivers and mountains, by regions inhabited by
the many tribes of indigenous peoples, and by locations of natural
resources. Equally as much Europeans mapped territory with respect
to the sites of missions, which concretely represented for them
their possession of the land, and, especially, the religious grounding
of their imperia.
The French and Spanish Missions Website
The French and Spanish Missions website: http://ecai.org/na-missions
is the interface for the publication. It allows access to resources
of interest to scholars, teachers, students, and other persons
interested in the missions history of North America. These resources
include an overview of the development of mission systems by
the Spanish and French in a document titled "Historical
Introduction to North American Missions" by John Corrigan.
There is a bibliography and a list of links to other websites.
The website also allows access to data
files (compiled primarily by Tracy Leavelle with contributions
from Arthur Remillard and John Corrigan) of all North American
mission sites that includes a number of attributes for each
mission (with some exceptions): religious order, sponsoring
empire, commodity production, population, Indian tribe(s), dates
of foundings and closings, location (with respect to natural
features such as rivers as well as in latitude and longitude),
epidemics (limited), and missionaries (including biographical
information). Several historical maps, from the
David Rumsey Collection, are included among the backgrounds
available for the display of information selected from the data
files.
The Missions Publication in TimeMap
The publication relies on the ECAI version of the TimeMap™
interactive interface for time and place access. The TimeMap™
interface displays map layers with a time scale bar. There are
two versions of the TimeMap™ interface for the publication.
The first is a web browser based Java interface that allows
online display of the publication resources. The ECAI TimeMap™
desktop interface with advanced capabilities can be downloaded
to your computer. See the Map
summary for information about the publication map interfaces.
The downloadable TimeMap™ version of the publication
provides much more interactive functionality. It is useful for
research or advanced learning. In addition, in the downloadable
version users can add additional resources from their own collections
or other sources to compare to the information in the publication.
The TimeMap™ interface enables user engagement
of North American missions data in the context of time and place.
It exemplifies the capabilities of the ECAI system to order
cultural data in ways responsive to user queries. The interface
displays mission sites within the time frames of their foundings
and closings, and offers the opportunity to access data for
each specific mission as well as to query the entire data collection
for information that can be displayed with reference to a particular
site. Background map layers include a Digital Elevation Map,
as well as geographic layers in the form of historical maps.
The primary dynamic map includes boundaries of the United States
(not including Alaska and Hawaii) and various state boundaries
(depending on the times of their admittance to the union).
See the French and Spanish Missions in North America
User
Guide for description and screenshots of the dynamic TimeMap™
of the publication data.
Advantages of this form of publication
This publication situates digitally rendered cultural data
relevant to the missions history of North America within an
interactive time and space interface. While offering a prose
overview of the history of French and Spanish missionary undertakings
in the New World, it invites the user to explore the data in
ways relevant to the user's own interests and capabilities.
As an online publication, it makes available substantial information
about a number of aspects of North American missions history,
and it offers opportunities for users to investigate connections
among various parts of that data. Thus, while serving in one
way as a reference tool, it also provides, by virtue of its
interactivity, a means by which users can easily compare and
contrast certain aspects of missions history across a variety
of fronts: French/Spanish, Jesuit/Franciscan, region (e.g. California/Florida),
time period, proximity to water, and in other ways.
Suggested citation:
Corrigan, John and Leavelle, Tracy, with Remillard, Arthur,
French and Spanish Missions in North America: Electronic
Cultural Atlas Publication (Berkeley: California Digital Library/University
of California, 2004).
52 images, 8 maps, 8 dynamic maps, 1 video.
An ECAI ePublication. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ecai/
