Resources and Tools

We are pleased to share many of the tools that we used to develop this site with other digital scholars. All resources in this section of the site are available free and open-source. Choose a tool below for more information, a demonstration, and information about using these technologies in your own research.

• Links to the Best Railroad History Sites on the Web: This list compiles the archives, libraries, museums, and resources we have used in our work and that we consider the most useful and valuable on the World Wide Web.
• American Presidential Voting Data by County (Maps and Charts) Demo version 1.0: This visualization uses I.C.P.S.R. data from the University of Michigan, The United States Historical Election Returns Series, and will be integrated with railroad and other data on migration and mobility in the 19th century. Here we have displayed the data by election year for the United States and for individual states. All candidates are returned in this set. This work is the continuation of a cyberinfrastracture award at University of Nebraska to study spatio-temporal visualization, and it is a collaboration of the Laboratory for Advanced Research in Computing.
• Spatio-temporal Correlation Technology Version 2.0 (Created at the UNL Computer Science Department, Laboratory for Advanced Research Computing) This map interface includes our 1840, 1850, 1855, and 1861 Historical GIS of the growth of the railroad network, integrated with selected data on passenger volume in the North and South, as well as slavery and population change. We will add political data, time table data, and other ways to analyze and see the patterns of railroad change.
• Language Analsyis Tool for William Jennings Bryan's 1896 Campaign includes a TokenX language analysis of frequently used words in Bryan's speeches and will soon include a GIS map displaying his railroad campaign route. This tool features word clouds, manipulation of word searching, and visualization options.
• Spatio-temporal Correlation Technology Version 1.0 (Created at the UNL Computer Science Department, Laboratory for Advanced Research Computing) This map interface focuses on Nebraska in the 1870s and correlates population change with events and railraod growth.
• Historical Railroad Systems GIS Files. Right click on a link below and save the file as a .kml file. To view these files, you may also need to download Google Earth.
  • William Jennings Bryan 1896 Campaign Trips (about 1.3 MB)
  • The 1861 Railroad System in America (about 6.3 MB)