Earlier today, the University’s Mapping History site was featured on Boing Boing, a popular internet culture blog that started out as a zine in 1988. Although the mapping history site is a joint project between history professor James Mohr and classics and history professor John Nicols, the pair have invited students to partake in the project since it began in the ’90s.

Mohr is grateful for the recognition, but says that it is especially exciting for the students who worked on the project.

“It’s a terrific example of how undergraduates can get involved in serious academic research,” Mohr said.

The site features different aspects of American, Latin American, European and African history that Boing Boing science editor Maggie Koerth-Baker describes as “fascinating and fantastic.” 

According to Mohr, the idea for the project spawned from his and Nicols’ unhappiness with regular hard-bound atlases.

“We were both very dissatisfied with traditional hard copy historical atlases and we felt that with modern digital technology we could make historical maps much more informative than they were in printed form because we could move things,” said Mohr. “So you could watch a battle unfold instead of trying to figure out a bunch of arrows and different colors.”