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Humap connects place with people, events, and artefacts

An online interactive map platform for reporting and storytelling projects – where the narrative is at the heart of your content.

Humap map detail

Mapping society


Humap is designed to tell your story or report by place, showing complex narratives in a visually understandable way. It allows users to interactively explore records and maps and facilitates new research pathways.

Records can be created and uploaded over time as projects are conceived, extended and completed. Many different organisations and communities can work together on the same project to add their content. Whether you are an academic, a business, a museum, council or community group, Humap can help.

Humap record detail

A record of human endeavour


A record can be an event, a building, a person, an object or a feature in a landscape. Add text and images, audio, video and links. Attribute and source it. Make it findable with tagging and open searching.

Records can be grouped into collections by whatever they have in common. Multiple collections can be viewed together or separately on the map. Walking trails and journeys can be created, where records are ordered and show as paths on the map.

Humap overlay detail

Overlays of data

Humap is designed to show layers of geo-rectified maps on top of a modern base map. Maps can be grouped together to form one layer and multiple layers shown. Users can switch them on and off, make them transparent or reorder them. But layers don’t have to be maps; statistical data, plans, networks and borders can be overlayed too.

Why Humap?

Humap solves some recurring themes present in your industry...

User experience

Informed by detailed user testing, Humap is designed to be intuitive and easy to use. It doesn’t clutter your site with esoteric widgets that only experts know how to use.



Humap looks and feels like no other map-based platform on the market. Your audience will be delighted by the ease-of-use when engaging with your project.

Community

If community engagement is your focus, Humap’s crowd sourcing capability makes adding user stories easy and intuitive.



Collections can be added by diverse groups and in their own time, helping your project to grow organically. Your audience will be delighted by the ease-of-use when engaging with your project.

Project legacy

So many great projects have disappeared once the funding has finished or the technology has changed. With no one to look after them, all that work slowly sets off into the sunset.

Humap keeps your project relevant for the future; it is hosted, maintained, and upgraded as an ongoing platform. When you want to come back and add more, your project will be ready to resume.

Current customers

Who's using the Humap platform?

  • Institute of Historic Research
  • Marshall University
  • Layers of London
  • Islington Council
  • Merseyside Maritime Museum
  • Coventry City of Culture

Use cases

Islington's Pride

A groups & communities use case

Islington’s Pride showcases the places and people of significance for the LGBTQ+ community in the London borough of Islington.

Humap created a map platform for Islington’s Pride to showcase the places, people and organisations of significance for the LGBTQ+ community in the London borough of Islington. We worked closely with the Heritage team at Islington Council to centre collections on subjects like Nightlife, Activism, Youth and Historical Figures and then created Trails to engage users to participate in real life walks in the borough. Oral histories were added to many records to preserve in an accessible way, memories of gay London at several pivotal moments in its history, before and after the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

Islington's Pride

Layers of London

A museums & academia use case

Several established London academic institutions used Humap to create the multi-textual mapping resource that is Layers of London.

The collections on the site cover a wide variety of subjects from archaeological digs to radical characters in Camden; from slaveowners to London’s worst disasters. The maps, drawn from many repositories, show not only historical eras but particular features such as the World War II bomb damage maps, Charles Booth’s famous poverty maps, London’s lost tramways and topographical plans. Crowd sourcing was a intrinsic part of the project and academics, members of the public, enthusiasts and professionals uploaded their collections and records, making Layers of London one of the greatest resources for the memory and history of the capital on the internet.

Layers of London

Coventry Atlas

A City of Culture use case

To coincide with Coventry UK City of Culture 2021, the City of Culture Trust employed Humap to create Coventry Atlas, an interactive map to showcase the rich & varied history of the city.

Coventry Atlas allows users to discover maps, building plans, streets of interest, pre-war drawings and photographs of the places and people of Coventry, from medieval times to 2021. Datasets are imported into the platform to create multi-layered overlays of ONS maps throughout the years, Victorian-era and Medieval maps.

The platform provides the client with a log-in administration and content management system for all interactive map content and data. Some of the features of the management system include the ability to create custom taxonomies in order to generate categories and tagging of data; build media galleries per record; create collections around sets of records; and administer the geography of all data on the interactive map.

Coventry Atlas

Features


Dig a little bit deeper – an unexhaustive list of Humap features

  • Your own map, data, and content platform as its own entity
  • Host Humap on your own domain, or embed it into your existing website
  • Integrate with data systems, collections management systems and third-party tools
  • Plot trails from records on the map
  • Create permalinks and QR codes for your trails – help your audience access trails easily on their mobile devices
  • Build up a comprehensive categories of data with Humap's taxonomies creator
  • Engage your audience in digital co-curation activities like geo-referencing and tagging
  • Crowd-source new content from participants, featuring audio, video, images, text and more
  • Showcase multiple images and media per record with the user-friendly gallery
  • Display and explore curated and crowdsourced content on the same map
  • Customise the functions to suit the specific needs of your project
  • Build a custom brand and design for your project
  • Ensure the legacy of your project after funding ends with Humap's Legacy plan
  • Export raw data for study and archiving
Miriam, Humap Head of Partnerships

Speak to Miriam, Head of Partnerships about how we can work together to bring your stories, data, and content to life on Humap.