Project History

Version 1 of the Atlas went online in February 2008. It was made possible by an Innovations in Teaching with Technology Awards (ITTA) grant from the University of Iowa, and the support of the University of Iowa Libraries and Information Technology Services at the University of Iowa. Greyson Purcell coded the site in Flash and HTML, and Steve Tomblin built a 3D model of a printing press in Maya.

Version 2 emerged in February 2013. It was built off of the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API) version 3. The timeline was controlled with jQuery UI Slider and a combination of server side and client side scripting languages. Version 2 was the first to incorporate data extracted directly from the ISTC.

Version 3 was launched in June 2019. The data has been incorporated onto a GIS server and mapped with ESRI's ArcGIS software. The website structure has been moved to WordPress and certain elements have been archived as being out of date and in need of full revision, such as the pages "The 15th Century Book" and "Printing Press Model."