WWU Spatial History

The WWU Spatial History project was primarily compiled by students at the College of the Environment during the winter of 2024. It is a digital history of the physical changes on the WWU campus from 1894 to 2024.

Geographically, this project covers the area that is now the main campus of Western Washington University, as well as the area of Bellingham that is immediately adjacent to campus. It included spatial data layers for:

  • Buildings (university and private)
  • Roads
  • Sculptures
  • Property (university, nearby parks and facilities)
  • Photos

Products

The main product of the project are the spatial-temporal data layers, which have been combined into an interactive temporal web map. This map includes a time slider that can be manually adjusted or set to auto-play to animate the changes to campus over time.

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Dates for campus features are derived from a variety of sources and vary widely in their accuracy. Given the large degree of variation between different data sources, the map should be taken as a good approximation of the overall story of the campus, while keeping in mind that the dates shown for an individual feature are plus-or-minus a few years.

As part of the 2024 Scholars Week, students from the WWU Spatial History project presented a poster detailing the process and the final products of their work.

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The temporal precision of different features varies widely. For a relatively few features, a specific date (with day of the year) is known. For most, we know only a year. Moreover, records for the 'start' of a feature (such as a building, road or sculpture) could refer to the date when construction began, the date when construction was completed, the date when the feature began to be used, or the date of an official dedication. Typically, these different dates would span multiple years. 

Archival data is often sparse, with gaps between available records that may span multiple years. Moreover, some archival records (especially maps) may include features not yet built (planned or hoped for construction) as well as features no longer in existence (out of date data). 

For all of these reasons the temporal precision is, at best, approximate, especially for the first 50 years of the campus' history.

Given the lack of data for the early years of the WWU campus, the data that is available has an outsized impact on the map display. For example, the oldest air photo available is from 1943, and serves as a reliable data source for buildings and roads for that date. However, it is unknown how long the features visible in 1943 had been there. Thus the most common 'Start Date' for features in the entire database is 1943 not because they were built in that year, but because there is no way of knowing when they were actually built; all we know for sure is that they were there in 1943.

This project was completed using a wide variety of data sources, including:

  • University records (buildings, sculptures)
  • City of Bellingham records (surrounding buildings and parks)
  • Air photos (dating back to 1943)
  • Oblique (ground) photos
  • City and Campus maps
  • Campus course catalog
  • Narrative accounts (campus histories, local newspapers, etc.)

The students that completed this project are:

  • Adrena Hamilton / Bentley
  • Alec Chisholm
  • Ben McNett
  • Sophie Serumgard

Stefan Freelan (WWU Staff) provided guidance and project management.