rsweeny@mun.ca
Welcome to Montréal, l'avenir du passé's experiment in public history. MAP is a research infrastructure that allows people to answer basic questions about change over time in and space. Through our applications you can explore a major urban centre undergoing rapid and fundamental change.
The site has seven sections. You navigate between sections using the menu along the top and within each section using the side menu.
This introductory section contains a brief description of the project, an invitation to join us and our contact information.
The applications section explains the QGIS applications available for download. These fully interactive applications allow you to create new knowledge about the past. You can answer questions no one has asked before. This exceptional creativity is only possible because you have full control over both the map layers and their underlying data. It takes only a few minutes to set up the free QGIS software and then you can run any of the nine applications currently available for download.
The section on databases provides access to the databases created by project members. These files can be downloaded for use in any standard relational database or spreadsheet program.
The documentation section consists of three parts: a brief discussion of our theory, a more extensive discussion of our methods, and slideshows illustrating how we constructed our Geographic Information System.
In the many presentations collective members have made over the past quarter century, we made extensive use of graphics, not only to illustrate but also to explain our work. The gallery showcases some of the best of our earlier work.
Introductions to our turn of the 20th century QGIS applications, as well as recent scholarly presentations are available as videos.
The web-based maps illustrate some of our most surprising research results. So although you do not have the freedom that the QGIS applications permit, with these interactive web maps you can immediately explore these results on your desktop, pad or cellphone. Two web maps are currently available: the first highlights the importance of property-owning women in turn of the century Montr&eaccute;al; the second maps how crowded housing was in 1901. Better than two-thirds of all households in the city enjoyed at least one room per person.
L'avenir du passé means the future of the past, and this title reflects our belief that an historical geographic information system would allow people to see their past anew.
Responsibility for the creation of MAP was collective. In 2000, the McGill historical geographer Sherry Olson rallied a team of investigators from across the country around the idea of building a multi-layered geo-referenced historical database for Montréal; each layer to consist of an historical map dynamically linked to a variety of period sources.
Initial financial support came from a three-year Geoide grant, thanks to partnerships with the Service d'urbanisme de la Ville de Montréal, McGill Rare Books and the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec. A good deal of the initial enthusiasm and know-how came from students excited by the possibility of applying innovative GIS technology to their own graduate research. They were supported and encouraged by geographers, historians and historical demographers who had long been interested in developing databases for the social and economic history of Montréal.
We started by building a base map for the year 2000 from files provided by the Service d'urbanisme. We then selected five highly detailed maps of the city over the past two centuries: 1825, 1846, 1880, 1912, and 1949 as the core document for each historical layer. We transformed these maps to align them with the year 2000 base map and we began the work of drawing a series of overlay maps (blocks, lots, buildings, etc) for each year.
From 2004, working with a reduced team, we worked on peopling 19th century maps by linking them to a wide variety of sources. Collaboration with epidemiologists interested in the spatial and historical dynamics of tuberculosis contributed to refining our base map, while a major collaborative initiative between Olson and demographers at Concordia significantly enriched our late 19th century materials. As did a 2007 collabortion funded by SSHRC with collaboration from colleagues at McGill the University of Western Ontario, which explored ethnicity and immigration in the last quarter of the 19th century.
At the 2010 Institut d'histoire de l'Amérique française meetings, MAP launched a CD-Rom of our three 19th century layers. This web site started as a virtual extension of that publication. We have since developed a number of QGIS applications based on this material.
For the past decade we have been working on sources from the turn of the 20th century. First we created a database of who owned the city in 1903 from a city publication. We created a map to represent this data and then linked almost all households of the 1901 census to that map. We also compiled a sample of just under a third of the people in the 1901 census. Finally, we have mapped the built environment of the city in 1912. Two Q-GIS applications for the turn of the 20th century are now available, while the base map for 1912 we hope to be available soon.
The applications, databases, and graphics on this site were developed as part of a major collective research effort. This work was partly financed and greatly facilitated by a number of public institutions in Canada. These materials constitute a research infrastructure.
By constructing this infrastructure, we hope to allow people to explore in unprecedented richness and complexity the dynamics of fundamental change in an urban setting. Conceptually then, our work is less about Montréal, than it is about how time and space interact. We hope it will stimulate research into other times and places.
The fruits of this major undertaking are being distributed free for research and teaching purposes that are explicitly and exclusively non-commercial in nature, in order to enrich and strengthen the public sphere. You are encouraged to join us in showing that another world is possible. If you have a data set that could be mapped, please let us know. Please note that by using MAP material, you are acknowledging your willingness to share any applications or demonstrations you may develop involving our materials.
Robert Sweeny
rsweeny@mun.ca