Project
imagineRio

Project Leads
Farès el-Dahdah, Rice University
Alida C. Metcalf, Rice University

Project URLs
English: https://www.imaginerio.org/en
Portuguese: https://www.imaginerio.org/pt

Project Reviewer
Luis Ferla, Universidade Federal de São Paulo

Project Overview

Alida C. Metcalf

imagineRio visualizes the city of Rio de Janeiro as it existed and as it was imagined from 1500 to the present. On a temporally accurate, interactive map of the city, views by artists, historical maps by cartographers, and site plans by architects and urbanists are located in time and space. By offering creative new ways for scholars, students, and residents to encounter the past, imagineRio encourages deeper understanding of the complex history of this vibrant city in the global south. 

A powerful map lies at the heart of imagineRio. Using ArcGIS Pro, we recovered geographic information by beginning in the present and working backwards in time. Using georeferenced modern and historical maps, as well as satellite imagery, we captured change over time. GIS specialists at Fondren Library and the Rice Spatial Studies Lab taught us how to map temporally accurate features, and our layers include such urban and environmental features as roads, buildings, water infrastructure, water bodies, landforms, and social spaces. An image database created in JSTOR Forum, designed with digital media specialists at the Fondren Library and the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro, contains the metadata of thousands of images, approximately 5,000 of which appear in imagineRio over our digital map. Many have contributed ideas, but it was primarily Rice students and staff, as well as the interns and staff at Instituto Moreira Salles, all working as paid research assistants, who built the historical GIS and image database that underlies imagineRio. 

The imagineRio web platform, beautifully designed and expertly built by Axis Maps, an outside contractor, publishes our data stored in the historical GIS and image database out to the public. Designed to be comprehensive and temporally accurate over time, every feature and every image that appears in imagineRio has a start and end date, as well as geographic coordinates. This means that a user may create unlimited maps for their specific interests by selecting the date, the place, and the orientation of the digital map. Its layers may be toggled on and off. Because the built environment of the city and its natural environment changed over time, the hills, beaches, lagoons, mangroves appear as they were on the date selected, even when such features no longer exist in the modern city. Similarly, users have great freedom when working with the geolocated images. A user may select which view to visualize over the digital map, whether a photograph, watercolor, historical map, urban plan, or aerial view. When these geolocated images are queried, not only do their IIIF manifests and simple metadata appear, but each has a corresponding viewshed that is projected over the map. Working between the map and the image, historical spaces come alive and can be studied in exceptional detail. 

The response from visitors and users of the platform has been overwhelmingly positive. We have developed a strong rapport with 20-30 super users, who have come to Rice or the Instituto Moreira Salles, and who have worked with us in online workshops. One product is our custom Story Mapping Application, imagineRio Narratives. Built by Axis Maps, this online digital writing space allows any interested user to tell a story about Rio de Janeiro with direct access to imagineRio’s geographic layers.

The potential for imagineRio to be used in teaching, research, and community history recovery is limitless, and we have begun to explore how the site can be more useful to teachers and residents of Rio. We have held three workshops with elementary and secondary school teachers, and we are imagining how short videos and itineraries can be embedded, making imagineRio exciting for classroom use. We have reached out to communities in Rio whose history is less visible and have invited them to incorporate their stories. For example, through collaboration with the Observatório de Favelas, the Maré Community contributed photographs that document life in their community. As further outreach, we envision a redesigned phone application that can be used for social media posts on historical topics.

We also have plans to develop a process wherein research can be hosted on imagineRio, with attribution to the contributor, which will bring new perspectives on life in Rio — such as the lived experiences of Africans in the city. In constant development, we seek new ways for imagineRio to engage users, incorporate data, and enable the writing of narratives about life in Rio. We hope that the site encourages the posing of new questions and the recovery of lost histories. Our community feedback loop is designed to work through a user’s forum, where suggestions can be recorded and where questions about imagineRio can be posted and responded to by other users. 

imagineRio is an interdisciplinary project in the humanities that visualizes urban change by paying particular attention to city planning, changes in the landscape, and how places were mapped by cartographers and represented by artists. The project began as a collaboration between an architect (Farès el-Dahdah) and an historian (Alida C. Metcalf) with the technical expertise from the GIS/Data Center and the Spatial Studies Lab at Rice University. David Heyman of Axis Maps led the design of the web platform. Through a Digital Art History Grant from the Getty Foundation, the team expanded to Rio and partnered with the Instituto Moreira Salles, a private museum and cultural institution. A second partnership with the Instituto Pereira Passos, a publicly funded center for research on Rio, began in 2023. The current version of imagineRio, our third, uses the latest WebGL technology, allowing it to harness the full power of a computer's 3D rendering hardware from within the browser using JavaScript. Tiled vector data is streamed from the cloud and rendered directly on the browser, improving load time and responsiveness, and unlocking new potentials for map customization.

imagineRio was exhibited at the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale and featured at the 27th World Congress of Architects in Rio de Janeiro. In addition to financial support from The Getty Foundation, the following units at Rice have contributed: Office of Information Technology, Ken Kennedy Institute, Baker Institute, Fondren Library, Humanities Research Center,  Department of History, and Office for Global and Digital Strategy.

Project Review

Luis Ferla

imagineRio is a digital platform dedicated to the history of the city of Rio de Janeiro and promotes the spatially organized integration of historical documentation of different types, such as photographs, cartographic maps, and urban reform plans. Its target audience includes researchers, students, and residents of the city interested in accessing the history of Rio de Janeiro since its foundation. The platform's identity is clearly situated in the humanities, as it mobilizes documentation and knowledge of the city's history.

A historical geographic information system (historical GIS), built with the support of ArcGISPro software, is the organizing device for all the platform's content. The “Narratives” section is also structured with ArcGIS technology. Three-dimensional visualizations are made possible with WebGL technology. It would be interesting to include a section on the platform dedicated to informing users about the technologies used. This information is scattered in various places, such as articles and the project overview provided above, but is not found on the platform itself. A section with this purpose would be very useful for users interested in the technical aspects of the platform.

The project is a milestone in digital humanities dedicated to urban history in Brazil. On the one hand, it constitutes a privileged research instrument for scholars of the city's history by integrating vast textual, iconographic, and cartographic documentation in the same environment. Besides academic researchers, the project aims to impact basic education by offering imagineRio as a powerful educational tool. Extending its reach beyond academic research and basic formal education, the project also aims to engage city residents in general, as the partnership with the NGO Observatório de Favelas seems to indicate.

The quality of the platform's design, the concern for user experience, and the interactive nature of many of its features facilitate the achievement of these objectives. On the other hand, imagineRio is also a reference for the community of digital humanists interested in developing open and collaborative platforms for their own research endeavors. Among the various technological innovations present in the project, perhaps the most daring and interesting is the "Narratives" section. The difficulty in reconciling narrative and spatialization technologies is a recurring theme among researchers who wish to publish their results but encounter inertial resistances and technical limitations in traditional means of scientific dissemination. The alternative offered by ImagineRio seems to be technically feasible and relatively easy to build and consult. The result is a huge gain in the quality of communication for the research results presented.