GIS Visualization of New York City Photography Studios, ca. 1830-1880

The humanities as a discipline have typically not used a rigid or technical method of assessment in the process of analysis. GIScience offers numerous benefits to this discipline by applying spatial analysis to rigorously understand it. Photography studios developed in the mid-19th Century as a highly popular business and emerging technology. This project was initiated by Dr. Jeremy Rowe with support from the ASU Emeritus College Research and Creative Activity and Undergraduate Research Initiative grants, and seeks to use GIS tools to understand the explosive growth of photography studios in the New York City area, specifically Manhattan and Brooklyn. Demonstrated in this project are several capabilities of the ESRI online GIS, including queries for year information, a tool showing growth over time, and a generated density map of photography studios.