Animating the Archive: The Geography of NiCHE Posts since 2004

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Places are at the centre of environmental history. What places have NiCHE authors chosen to write about over the lifespan of the blog?

The animation below draws on the entire NiCHE archive to visualize the places most frequently referred to in blog posts dating back to 2004. To create it, the blog had to be geoparsed and cleaned to standardize names (“Qu√©bec” became “Quebec”), correct misplacements (for some reason, geoparsers insist that Giant Mine is three different places in the US), and make decisions about how to the represent complex regions that NiCHE authors love to write about (such as “the Arctic”).

Geoffrey Wallace (Landscape Archive Cartography), transformed the resulting data into an animation that traces NiCHE’s growing geographic scope over time. What emerged is a visual representation of how NiCHE authors have written about different places over the world for the last two decades.

NiCHE’s blog (“the Otter”) has taken various forms during the time span represented. Early in NiCHE’s history, the blog was only one facet of a multipurpose site: a calendar, an event hub, an announcement board, a website host, and a member directory. The site as a whole was likewise only one facet of a larger network with its own in-person meet-ups, events, and initiatives. Later, social media drove a new era of engagement whereby the blog became a single node in a constellation of other platforms drawing in an interdisciplinary and public audience. When NiCHE could no longer rely on external funding it underwent yet another shift, pulling together the most successful aspects of earlier iterations to become something closer to what it is today — a volunteer-run environmental history blog curated by a small and nimble editorial team with a strong social media presence and an ever-growing international audience.

Although the form and function of NiCHE has changed over time, the blog has always provided a landing place that we keep coming back to. Here, NiCHE’s contributors share ideas, highlight sources, reflect on the nature of their work, advertise events and publications, and experiment with different methods of scholarly communication. Over time, the blog has published more frequently and, as this animation shows, expanded its geographic scope. Certain patterns are unsurprising: population centres in Canada and the global North a strongly represented, particularly in places with leading environmental history institutions. The geographies show a tendency for NiCHE contributors to refer to ecological regions (“the plains” or “the Caribbean”) in addition to the usual national boundaries. Around 2009, oceans entered NiCHE’s lexicon. The animation also shows conspicuous absences. South America and Africa are referred to with increasing frequency after 2014, but they continue to appear mostly in general terms (on the national or continental scale, rather than in the specific).

NiCHE’s annual fundraising campaign is more than a call for support — its a chance to reflect on our work and how it has changed over time. By visualising the geography of NiCHE posts, we can speculate about how the places we wrote about were driven by the shifting form of the website as well as wider trends in environmental history. While NiCHE began as a Canadian environmental history network, its subject matter has always been situated in an international context, fostering conversations and collaborations across borders. What does this animation tell us about the questions we asked, and what stories remain untold?

As NiCHE looks ahead to 2026, we look forward fostering even more conversations that cross boundaries — geographic, disciplinary and methodological.

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Credits:

Thousands of NiCHE authors and editors wrote and produced the articles that underly this data.

Former editors of NiCHE Jim Clifford and Josh MacFadyen wielded the geoparser, did some early scoping/trouble-shooting, and provided input on its meaning.

Geoffrey Wallace, McGill-history-graduate-turned-professional-cartographer did the bulk of the work. He created a usable dataset, mapped it, and created the animation.

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Mica Jorgenson

Mica Jorgenson is an environmental historian of natural resources in Canada. She works in both the academic and public sectors, and teaches periodically at the University of Northern British Columbia.

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