Archives in Maps (AIM)
Toni MacRae developed the Archives in Maps (AIM) Tool to as part of her Masters of Interdisciplinary Studies thesis (2026), supervised by Sasha Mullally and Yun Zhang.
Below, you can explore AIM, which links carefully-curated and geo-referenced historical aerial photograph mosaics of downtown Fredericton to engineering reports from municipal archives, revealing technical and spatial details of urban expansion from the 1920s to 1990s.
Explore the AIM tool
Archives-In-Maps (AIM) integrates aerial imagery and archival documents within a user-driven web GIS environment. Featuring eighty years of data for Fredericton, New Brunswick, AIM presents and integrates geospatial and archival materials in the same resource. This enhances interdisciplinary "deep mapping" research and supports new ways of exploring historical change.
"Ready, AIM, Archive..."
Although digital archives and GIS have expanded opportunities for spatial analysis, they often remain disconnected, limiting researchers’ ability to link historical aerial photographs with the archival records needed to interpret them. MacRae addresses this gap through an integrated Archives-in-Maps platform.
Using Fredericton’s street-lighting expansion from the 1920s to the late 1950s as a case study,
she demonstrates how municipal investment prioritized commercial and public spaces, while residential neighbourhoods in the downtown core continued to grow.
