A static HyperCities site for experiencing HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities through historical maps, time, and a source-grounded Hyperbook.
This is not a recreation of the original GIS platform or a conventional academic website. It realizes the HyperCities proposition: a visitor can enter a place, descend through its cartographic past, and encounter ideas, voices, and source pages that the movement itself evokes.
- A dark, label-free world map reveals the real extents of historical maps as restrained red traces.
- A single GROUND opener shifts the field between its default dark map and Esri World Imagery. When an original historical raster is present, its HISTORICAL VEIL slider lets the visitor compare the map with the present beneath it.
- The map remains the landing experience. A quiet EXPLORE opens READ, WINDOWS, ANNOTATIONS, and ORIGINS with a dashed dérive between entrances. Return to the map through the header; Take a Map remains attached to the selected historical map.
- TAKE A MAP is an archival action available whenever a historical layer is selected; Explore remains an optional archive-led entrance. Its floating source panel has three focused tabs—an interactive MapLibre map and complete HTML recipe, Google Earth/KML instructions, and QGIS instructions. It never implies a raster download or rights grant.
- Hovering a location with overlapping maps previews a TimeWell; clicking locks a CORE at that coordinate.
- The TimeWell is HyperCities’ temporal-CORE innovation: a floating three-dimensional cross-section generated when a visitor cuts into a location. Its strata preserve each map's geographic aspect ratio, a central pillar fixes the drilled coordinate, and the vertical axis makes the available dates traversable.
- Selecting a layer moves the map to that historical map's actual geographic extent and attempts to display its original raster tiles. The map remains freely pannable and zoomable: a drag or wheel gesture begun in the TimeWell's transparent surrounding space is passed through to MapLibre, while strata, years, and the core itself remain selectable.
- The full-book Hyperbook supplies encounters through direct place evidence, cartographic and temporal resonance, visitor actions, concepts, and deliberately labelled editorial routes. It may also remain silent.
- READ opens the book as a 212-page facsimile. Its visible Previous/Next controls and Left/Right keys turn pages. A quotation or title opens this same reader at its cited page; an exact quotation locator is highlighted when one is available.
- The TRACE holds a fading record of the current dérive. Arrow keys mirror the offered movements: Up/Down move through time, Right accepts a lateral route, and Left/Esc returns toward the map. In the book reader, Left/Right instead turn pages.
- A selected historical map can hold public annotations. Choosing a point opens a small on-map note composer: map and coordinates are fixed context, while visitors supply a note, a required public name or alias, and optional comma-separated tags. Google Forms receives the submission; the published Sheet supplies the public notes. An alias is a display name, not a verified account.
Historical-map extents remain quiet until a visitor chooses a place to enter.
The TimeWell is not a timeline placed beside a map, nor a generic tilted map. It begins at the coordinate the visitor has cored. Its central cylinder holds that location while every available historical map clings to it as an actual, differently proportioned footprint: X/Y remains geographic extent; Z becomes historical position.
Older strata descend into the well; later maps rise toward the present. Large gaps are expanded enough to remain perceptible, while clusters of nearby dates stay traversable. Selecting a stratum moves the map itself to that map's real extent and, where available, loads its original raster tiles. The TimeWell therefore makes an excavation in place and time, rather than turning the archive into a sequence of cards.
The selected layer is held against the bore and its complete title wraps beside the current year rather than being clipped. This detail also makes the irregular geographic footprints and expanded temporal gaps legible at close range.
A selected map now begins a single visible movement: map identity, the source-grounded book encounter it evokes, one named STRAY route, and the visitor's own TRACE. The selected map shows its location, year, title, and available catalog record; the book fragment opens the appropriate page in READ. STRAY names its destination and identifies the kind and evidential status of its source-grounded connection, rather than behaving like an unexplained randomizer.
- Pan or zoom anywhere in the world map; choose EXPLORE to orient yourself without leaving it.
- Choose TAKE A MAP in Explore to enter an archive-led route: core a place, select a layer, and open its map slip.
- Hover over historical-map depth to preview a TimeWell; tap or click to cut a CORE.
- Choose a stratum, a year, or use Up/Down to move across available maps in time.
- Follow the named STRAY route—or accept it with Right—to take one source-grounded lateral step; use the attached TRACE to see where the dérive has passed.
- Choose READ to move through the book page by page, or open a quotation/title to enter READ at its cited page. Esc, the close mark, or clicking outside returns to the map.
The ? affordance keeps this same grammar available without an onboarding sequence. Pointer and touch interactions remain primary; keyboard navigation is an optional echo.
EXPLORE → ORIGINS opens a searchable catalogue of all 49 public recordings listed by the original HyperCities channel on 26 September 2026. Browse by place, topic, or time; the Time menu distinguishes historical subjects from YouTube upload years. Short stories, longer collections, variant edits, and technical recordings retain their original titles.
The charcoal window, serif titles, cover-red dotted trail, and dimmed map continue the site's visual language. Previous/Next move through the filtered results; related recordings show their destination title and the reason for the connection (same place or shared topic). These are editorial browsing links, not claimed historical relationships. On phones, the catalogue folds away after choosing a film and can be reopened. Escape, the backdrop, and ← MAP preserve the map beneath.
Playback uses an ordinary YouTube embed with optional API diagnostics. The player is never covered by a readiness timeout; reload and direct YouTube links remain available. YouTube restrictions can still prevent a video playing inside the site (the Tehran recording is age-restricted). Closing or changing films removes the player and stops sound. Catalogue records live in data/origins-videos.json, with the interface in js/origins.js. See the archive notes for evidence and limitations.
The site is backed by a reviewable, static full-book graph. The scholarly passage stays primary; encounter fragments are smaller source-grounded entrances into passages, quotations, concepts, people, projects, Windows, events, figures, and technical material.
WINDOWS opens the book's Los Angeles Ghost Maps (pp. 66–73), PDub Productions: Mapping HiFi (74–83), Rome: Jumping Over the Line (128–133), and Mapping the 2009 Election Protests in Tehran (134–139). Each entrance leads to a bounded reader preserving the original pages and illustrations, with facing pages on wide screens, single pages on narrow screens, and a route into READ at the current page. Short introductions are editorial summaries, not quotations. Source ranges and reading behavior.
| Artifact | Purpose |
|---|---|
| hyperbook.json | Book hierarchy and source objects |
| entities.json | Controlled vocabulary and aliases |
| edges.json | Explicit and carefully labelled inferred relationships |
| encounters.json | Encounter-sized source objects linked to their parent passages |
| experience-affordances.json | Separate editorial proposals for future state-aware activation |
| analysis.json | Diversity, repetition, hubs, and human-review priorities |
| derives.json | Auditable conceptual dérive simulations |
| book-page locations | Page-local quotation locators for the reader |
| book pages | 212 WebP facsimiles from the supplied edition |
Current extraction totals: 56 passages, 160 quotations, 291 encounter fragments, 138 controlled entities, 1,481 source-graph edges, and 1,850 editorial affordances.
The data deliberately separates book-explicit, book-inferred, and editorial claims. Geographic activation is conservative: country-scale entities are never used as a spatial fallback, and the system can return no encounter rather than pretend a passage is about the current map. The narrow Japan thread is explicitly editorial and favors Yoh Kawano's Mapping Events / Tohoku / Fukushima material without claiming that every Japanese map depicts those places.
See the full schema and editorial policy and four conceptual dérive tests for the evidence model, safeguards, and review priorities.
HyperCities is designed to remain publishable from GitHub Pages:
- HTML, CSS, vanilla JavaScript ES modules, and static JSON
- MapLibre GL JS for the navigable basemap
- deck.gl for historical footprints and the TimeWell's three-dimensional layers
- no database, site backend, authentication, framework, or build pipeline; annotations use Google Forms and a published Sheets feed
Use GitHub Pages or any local static HTTP server for preview. Do not open index.html through file://: browsers isolate that origin and block the JSON data reads the site needs.
Expand a selected map's Map record in the lower-left encounter panel and choose Edit map record. The editor reads the Map Library's public CSV, previews the raster in MapLibre, and prepares a GitHub Issue containing only changed fields. Submitting that issue requires a GitHub account; a repository Action validates edits by yohman, updates the Map Library CSV, regenerates its companion JSON, and publishes directly to main. No repository collaborator access or second review is needed for that allowlisted account. The map layer fields on this site read the CSV directly, so changes become visible after the public file/cache updates; the Hyperbook relationship graph remains the committed graph. Setup and constraints are documented in the Map Library editing guide.
Take a Map is a full floating panel rather than a small map-corner export menu. It separates three realistic routes into tabs and exposes only transfer paths that preserve what the collection actually supplies:
- MapLibre: a live, pan-and-zoom embed with a complete, copyable HTML page containing this map's XYZ template, geographic bounds, zoom range, and citation.
- Google Earth / KML: a downloaded Network-Link KML plus both routes into Google Earth Pro:
File → Open…for the download, orAdd → Network Link…with the supplied hosted KML URL. The KML draws the source XYZ tiles as geographic overlays at the recorded minimum zoom, then refreshes its hosted record hourly; MapLibre and QGIS retain the full interactive tile pyramid. - QGIS: the exact XYZ template and steps to create a QGIS Browser-panel connection for the selected historical raster.
GeoJSON, generic map-record, and TileJSON downloads are intentionally not surfaced: by themselves they only expose an outline or a technical descriptor, not the historical map. Current source records do not establish uniform rights, CORS policy, full raster-download paths, or georeferencing control points, so the panel retains the source condition and asks users to verify the original collection's terms before making derivatives or overlays.
The source edition is eScholarship UC item 3mh5t455.pdf. The committed graph covers printed pp. 6–203; its later apparatus remains source material but is not passage-extracted. Page images cover all 212 scanned pages.
The graph and facsimiles can be regenerated with the repository scripts:
mkdir -p tmp/hyperbook-extraction
pdftotext -raw "eScholarship UC item 3mh5t455.pdf" tmp/hyperbook-extraction/book-raw.txt
node scripts/build-hyperbook-full.mjs tmp/hyperbook-extraction/book-raw.txt
node scripts/validate-hyperbook-full.mjs tmp/hyperbook-extraction/book-raw.txt
node scripts/simulate-hyperbook-derives.mjs
node scripts/build-book-page-assets.mjstmp/ contains local extraction intermediates and is intentionally not a source of runtime behavior.