(The orthomosaic that we developed to depict Teepee Tonka Park using drone imagery.)

Digital History, Public Heritage and Deep Mapping was my first, and last, History class at Carleton, and it was a doozy. As my first exposure to mapping, history, and the public involvement of an ACE class, the final project involved coming to the Rice County Historical Society to gather data from old newspapers, scanned maps of previous century Northfield, archives of government records, and physically going to Teepee Tonka Park and get some drone recordings to make RGB and thermal orthomosaics of the area.

While I was collecting information related to the industrial development around the Park, my teammate was researching through even older historical records of the old Dakota people, and we made this website below. This whole thing was also just a part of the class-wide project to digitize the history of Rice County related to Alexander Faribault.

To be honest, without my teammate’s expertise as a History major, I think my hair would have already turned gray from the stress of doing a project with this level of manual work for the first time.

[Click here to access our full research]