History

The Chicago Imagebase Project, a core element of the Metropolitan Chicago Infobase Project, was started in 1995 at the Art History Department at UIC. The department began the project in response to a particularly pressing need of most art history departments: the necessity of making available to students for study the images shown as slides in the classroom but not readily available in the textbooks used for the course. In the past this function has been accomplished at most universities by duplicating slides and placing them in locked, illuminated cases accessible to students. Not only was this time consuming and expensive, but it was also inconvenient for many students and the prolonged exposure to light was bad for the slides. Putting slides up on the Web was a very attractive alternative, one that has been pursued by slide libraries around the country.

Several faculty members in the UIC art history department imagined a much wider agenda. Reasoning that slide libraries around the country would all be digitizing slides, they thought that a concerted effort by individual universities to specialize in particular kinds of materials would be useful. Because the Art History Department at UIC is a national leader in the study of the built environment, a subject that brings together the study of architecture, design, landscape, urban photography, etc., they decided to concentrate on images more specifically related to the Chicago area. They also realized that the images could be used for much more than just teaching. An aggressive program of identifying, digitizing and putting on the web visual images of Chicago that were hard to locate or difficult of access- fire insurance and other maps and aerial views, for example, two of the richest sources of information about most cities- could be a powerful tool for scholars and a useful service for the general public. Joining with their colleagues in the art history department at the University of Illinois at Urbana they obtained a grant from the Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University to put up images of the Chicago area built environment on the Web.

One of the chief obstacles to using images relating to Chicago, it was obvious from the first, was indexing them adequately. While it would be possible, for example, to index views of buildings by traditional text-based means, by name of building, street address or by date or architect, for example, this can lead to clumsy and time-consuming searches. For someone wanting to find, for example, images taken near the corner of North and Damen avenues, the user would have to find a map, note all the adjacent streets and their address ranges and check each against the address index for the images listed on the Web. The same would be true of someone interested in determining quickly what kind of building would be found in the far western suburbs. To remedy this kind of problem and to make searching much more efficient, it was decided to link all images to a Geographic Information System (GIS). This would allow easier coordination of very disparate materials on a single site. Images could be combined with census data and with planning, legal and tax information, for example. On the other hand, the GIS system could potentially be used to allow an easier, more intuitive, more user-friendly way to search based on maps and images rather than on words. A group consisting of members of the Art History, Architecture, Urban Planning and Geography Departments joined together under the aegis of the City Design Center, an interdisciplinary unit administratively located in the College of Architecture and the Arts at UIC, obtained a grant from UIC to implement this GIS-based project.

Shortly thereafter, members of the group teamed up with the Chicago Teachers' Center of Northeastern Illinois University to secure a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for funds to use the Imagebase Project to help middle school teachers in the Chicago Public Schools develop curriculum related to Chicago's built environment (Title: Interactive and Engaged Learning of History through Architecture. Funded by NEH Education Development and Demonstration Grant; May, 1997). The pilot project has concentrated on two areas: The Loop, because of its centrality and obvious interest to individuals world wide; and Lawndale, a poor, predominantly African American neighborhood where the City Design Center has been active in community projects. At present, the Chicago Imagebase site contains hundred of images with accompanying text, including 1886 Robinson Fire Insurance Atlas maps, 1893 Rand McNally Bird's-Eye Views of downtown, photographs of well-known buildings, aerial views, and many other images.  See Chicago Imagebase.

There are a substantial number of projects around the country that are attempting to do some of the same things we are envisioning. We have been in touch with representatives of a number of these ventures and expect to work together with them to coordinate efforts and make our sites compatible to facilitate searches across data bases and projects. The most important of these is ISLA (Information System for Los Angeles). This project, launched by the University of Southern California, is an extremely ambitious attempt to provide information about the Los Angeles built environment . Partners include major Los Angeles area institutions and private companies. This system, developed independently but simultaneously with our system, is the closest project we know of in the country. Like the Chicago Infobase project it is based in part on a GIS system and will allow visual navigation as well as traditional word searches. Like our project, it is awaiting the development of software that will make the GIS system compatible with the Web. A number of individuals from both the Urbana and Chicago campuses of our university have had discussions with Li Hunt of ISLA about possible collaborations. A number of other projects less far along in development aim to use some of the same features, for example the Denver Temporal GIS Project. We have also been talking to individuals involved in projects where multiple government agencies using GIS are working on putting their systems on the Web. The best example of this we have found to date is in east central Wisconsin where a number of counties and municipal jurisdictions comprising the East Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission have created a joint GIS project that is used by planning and other departments on a daily basis and have a contract with a vendor in Colorado to put their GIS system, based on Genesis and Genemap, up on the Net.

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