NLI supports the Humanities Research Center (HRC) at Rice University and their sustainable, multi-tiered, and data-driven Levant Carta initiative. The Levant Carta is dedicated to the production of a cartographic platform that will bring together scholarly networks and enable the production of temporally accurate and illustrated maps of Levantine cities. For this initiative, the HRC will interconnect a series of activities, meant to act as bridges across disciplines, schools, and universities both in the US and abroad.
The Levant Carta initiative will enable many ongoing research projects to reach a phase of public dissemination, allow others, as yet unimagined, to take shape, contribute to information technology infrastructure on campus, provide undergraduate and graduate students with new educational and professional experience, and create research communities dedicated to the study of the Levant.
Levant Carta will be devoted to mapping the evolution of Levantine cities as the sites of a memorable past, a difficult present, and hopefully a better future. An example can be found at the Levant Carta/Beirut platform. Facilitating cutting-edge research on the history of Levantine cities is the Levant Carta’s primary goal, and this will subsequently lead to the development of teaching modules so that the platform can be used in classrooms anywhere in the world.
Participants in Levant Carta will be able to rely on the assistance of a resident postdoctoral fellow and two full time GIS specialists/developers in order to learn how to work with the platform, share and disseminate the data of their research in the social and urban history of Levantine cities, and thereby foster collaborative research projects in the long term. Each City project will consist of a first phase that involves the development of a data model followed by the actual design of the map and its user-interfaces, all within the Levant Carta environment.
Additional information about the Levant Carta initiative and its educational programs will be available shortly.