Mapping the History of Rio de Janeiro: Maps, Plans, and Views in ImagineRio

Developed at Rice University by Farès el-Dahdah and Alida Metcalf, imagineRio is a searchable digital atlas that visually and cartographically illustrates the urban evolution of Rio de Janeiro over the entire history of the city, as it has existed and as it has been imagined. Views of the city created by artists, maps by cartographers, ground floor plans by architects, and urban plans by city leaders—all drawn from iconographic, cartographic, and architectural archives—are located in both time and space while their associated visual and spatial data are integrated across multiple databases and servers. The relationship among the platform’s various elements produces a web environment where vector, spatial, and raster data can be viewed and queried in new ways by historians. This paper will demonstrate how traditional sources can be analyzed in new ways in order to reconstruct the spatial history of the city. The particular example to be discussed will be the history of water.