GIS and the Social Patterning of Women in Two Contrasting 19th Century American Cities

It is twenty years since Ed Ayers launched his Valley of the Shadow project, a technological leap that heralded the digital transformation of American history. The project’s prescient nature was startling: launched in the same year as the World Wide Web, it was one of the first digital history projects, certainly one of the first in the United States. 1 This was an amazing new development – a website – demonstrating how computer technology could bring to any computer user massive levels of primary documents for the study of the past. It is a measure of the project’s revolutionary impact that we today consider such an accomplishment routine and even mundane.