The Ecologies, Knowledge, and Power in the Gulf of St. Lawrence Region c.1500-Present project is gearing up for its next summer meeting. In July 2025 the group will gather at Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB. Take a look at the meeting website here (https://projects.upei.ca/geolab/events/2025-gulf-knowledge/) and consider submitting an abstract or reaching out to Josh MacFadyen for more information.
Check out the short film recently produced by ConsiderateAgency to promote the Gulf project and our first “Gulf Ecologies” meeting held last year at the Canadian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation in St Peters, PEI. OK, 9 minutes isn’t “short” anymore, but it has some lovely shots of the facility in St Peters, the Morell River field trip, and the Basin Head beach and fisheries museum. Enjoy!
Click the image above to try out GeoGULF, a new portal for exploring historical maps of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The core maps displayed in this early version are the Admiralty Charts produced by Captain Henry W. Bayfield and his staff during the St. Lawrence Survey (1827-1856).
Click the image above to try out the GeoPEI a new portal for exploring maps, atlases, aerial photos, and geospatial data pertaining to the history of Prince Edward Island. The GeoPEI portal takes maps that have been digitized on UPEI Robertson Library’s Island Imagined platform, and it overlays them on modern maps of PEI such as satellite images, street grids, and the latest aerial photos produced by the province. It also provides access to the Province’s aerial photographs going back to 1968 and 1935. In the future, users will also be able to find historical data such as the Island’s buildings, properties, roads, and other built infrastructure..
Users may toggle between seven historical maps and aerial photo layers, as well as the 2020 aerial photos and a number of basemaps in the ArcGIS Online viewer. Search for an address or location using the glass at the top left. Next to it are tools for measuring features and changing the basemap. Note, the default basemap (imagery hybrid) keeps the roads and place name labels above the historical layers. This is often helpful for identifying land use change. If you prefer not to see the labels, change the basemap to the plain imagery option. Happy historical mapping!
The GeoREACH Lab is excited to share a new digital mapping project created by the Director, Dr. Joshua MacFadyen and students in Applied Communications, Leadership & Culture 2090 (Digital Humanities) over the last year.
The Story Map is organized around eighty sites that were either central to or symbolic of developments in the history of transportation in the greater Charlottetown area. A menu at the top brings you to six sections that explore the city through a historical map mosaic (in 1917) followed by five main ways that people traveled and transported goods from the city’s beginnings until the interwar period.
A browser preview of one section of the GeoREACH Lab Story Map, By Muscle, Mast, and Motor: A Transportation History of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
The image above offers a preview of the Story Map’s functionality. However, browsers and mobile devices will display the content differently.
Josh and co-author Barbara Rousseau are grateful to many collaborators for their inspiration, assistance, and visits to ACLC 2090, particularly from Natalie Munn at the City of Charlottetown Heritage & Planning branch. The collections and heritage professionals at UPEI’s Robertson Library, PEI’s Public Archives and Record Office, and L’Nuey were also instrumental to the Story Map.
Thank-you, again, to all who contributed; please enjoy the project and share it widely!
Coal delivery by horse and wagon, 1958. At the corner of Queen and Grafton Streets. The photo was taken by Chris Lund for the 1959 NFB Photo Story “‘They Builded Better than They Knew’: Charlottetown: Cradle of Confederation.” Source: Library and Archives Canada / National Film Board fonds, e011176837, and Charlottetown Stories .
Welcome to the Atlantic Canada Studies Conference DH Workshop “Mapping Rural Lives and Environments,” held on 25 May, 2022 at UNB Fredericton. See below for the program and a few of the links and resources that we used in various sessions.
Workshop Program, Mapping Rural Lives and Environments [PDF]
