A new and exciting addition to the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) is the data behind the City Nature project. This innovative project combines methodologies from the digital humanities and spatial analysis fields to explore urban nature. Project PIs are Jon Christensen and Michael Kahan with development work by both Karl Grossner and Elijah Meeks.

The City Nature project not only submitted project data to SDR for preservation; the team modified the website so that it uses the data directly served from the SDR to drive some of the visualizations online! This new use of SDR demonstrates that not only can researchers submit and provide access to their data by way of SDR, they can also use the provided data URL’s to power rich interactive visualizations. Data in SDR is powering the map and Google Street view seen in the Naturehoods Explorer visualization.

This new functionality was made possible by a change in which our file service application serves out data files. We now enable Cross Origin Resource access which allows visualization and analysis of the files directly from other sites. Another example is this mapping visualization of the same Naturehoods Explorer data, created by Elijah Meeks: http://bl.ocks.org/emeeks/757e699fed2658bcb42b .