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• 1 2017-12-20T22:45:56+00:00 About 36 Mapping Isabella Bird plain 2018-02-19T17:49:52+00:00 This website is an open-source hub for students, educators, and researchers interested in the history of explorer Isabella Lucy Bird (1831-1904). It uses her example to explore the relationship between maps, explorers, visual culture, and tourism in Japan in the late nineteenth century. The website is run and maintained by Dr. Christina M. Spiker since 2017. She first became interested in Isabella Bird while completing her doctoral dissertation on indigenous Ainu representation in the exploration of Hokkaido.
  
  Many of the interactive maps found on this site are powered by tabular data (spreadsheets) culled from historical texts freely available on Archive.org and HathiTrust Digital Library. These sources are in the public domain. This information is visualized through various geospatial mapping applications, such as CARTO, ArcGIS, Mapbox, Leaflet, and StoryMapJS. These maps are then placed into context alongside examples of relevant visual culture.
  
  
  The project is still in its infancy, but collaborations are encouraged and welcome. If you or your classroom would like to become involved, please don't hesitate to get in touch by leaving a comment below.
• 1 media/Bird-1.jpg media/Bird-1.jpg 2017-12-11T23:34:40+00:00 Isabella Bird: A Brief Biography 21 plain 27 2023-01-31T19:58:55+00:00 Isabella Lucy Bird was a British naturalist, explorer, writer, and photographer.
  
  She was born on October 15, 1831 in the home of her maternal grandmother in Boroughridge Hall, North Yorkshire, Great Britain. The daughter of Reverend Edward Bird BA (1794-1858) and Dora Lawson (1803-1866), she was raised in an upper middle class family and her parents took responsibility for her education at home. Under her father's tutelage, she learned a variety of subjects, including formal studies in flora and fauna. His lessons would serve her writing well and can be seen inflected in her detailed writings on the natural landscape found in her travelogues.

  Throughout her life,  Bird called 16 Melville Street in Edinburgh, Scotland home. She died there on October 7, 1904 and was laid to rest in the Dean Cemetery on the west side of Edinburgh. Her obituary appeared in the American Geographical Society Bulletin.

  After her death in 1904, the London Spectator explained that her "bright intelligence, [and] an extreme curiosity as to the world outside, made it impossible for her brain and her nature generally to be narrowed and stiffened by the strictly evangelical atmosphere of her childhood" (1907). It is of no surprise then that her life of adventure began in 1854 (at the age of 23), when her doctors recommended a sea voyage and open air as a means to improve her chronically bad health.