Material / Image Research Lab · UC Santa Barbara

MIRL Map

Document a place through geolocated photographs and the writing that interprets them.

MIRL Map turns a body of photographs into two readings of the same material: an interactive map, where each image rests at the place it was made, and a photo essay that moves through them in sequence. Add a caption and as much interpretation as the work asks for. Built for fieldwork, archives, exhibitions, and the classroom, and yours to own, cite, and keep.

★  Create your own map See a live example

Creating a map opens GitHub, where you sign in and a copy is made in your own account. Free, open source, and no coding required.

mirl-ucsb.github.io/mirl-map-example
The example map, The Managed Edge: a satellite view of the UC Santa Barbara coast with photographs pinned along a bluff path, and a side panel showing one photograph with its caption, a narrative, and a citation. Open the example ↗
A live example: The Managed Edge, a documentary walk along the bluffs where UC Santa Barbara meets the Pacific. Each photograph sits where it was taken, beside the writing that reads it.
How it works

From sign-in to a published map

1

Make your own copy

Sign in with GitHub and a complete copy of the platform is created in your account. You hold the repository, the images, and the text from the start.

2

Add photographs and interpretation

Work in a browser dashboard, or directly in plain text files. Each photograph takes a caption and an optional narrative; its location and orientation are read from the image itself.

3

Publish and preserve

Publish your map and photo essay online at no cost, at an address you control. Everything is kept as plain images and text, legible long after the software has moved on.

What it is suited to

One method, many projects

MIRL Map is a method rather than a template. If a subject can be photographed and located on a map, it can be documented here.

A neighborhood survey A single monument An archaeological site An oral-history project A field-documentation record A teaching collection An exhibition A pilgrimage or migration route A memory map
What it supports

Built for scholarly use

A new map is nothing but your photographs and your words. Each further capability stays out of the way until you call on it.

An interactive map and a photo essay, generated together from the same photographs and writing.
A citation for every photograph, ready in Chicago, MLA, APA, and BibTeX.
Full-text search across every caption and narrative at once.
Data you own, kept as plain images and text in your own repository, free to export, archive, or move.
More than one language, including right-to-left scripts such as Arabic.
Accessible by design, with scalable text, high contrast, and reduced motion.
Optional layers when a project calls for them: timelines, statistics, oral-history voices, before-and-after photographs, and georeferenced historical maps.
Open source and free, with no account to maintain and nothing to lock you in.
Where it comes from

From a working project

MIRL Map began as a documentary map of the village of Lifta and was generalized so that any researcher, teacher, or community could use the same method. It is developed and maintained at the Material / Image Research Lab in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, UC Santa Barbara.

Begin your map

Free to use and yours to keep. From signing in to your first photograph on the map is a matter of minutes.

★  Create your own map