An Open Resource Since 2003

Exploring moviegoing
experiences through a
historic lens

Our Mission

Mapping Movies seeks to explore the landscape of moving pictures, because movies come and go, theaters rise and fall, and the audience has to be in place.

The project aims to stimulate research and discovery at the intersection of cinema history, social history, spatial humanities, and cultural geography. Through the heuristic use of GIS tools, Mapping Movies explores the relations between media infrastructure, landscape, community, demography, transportation, modernization, marginalization, and memories of place. It also tests the limits of mapping as a method and mode for historical research and engagement.

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Mapping Movies by the Numbers

Year Founded

1963

Movie Venues

3167 +

Towns & Cities

1984 +

Recent Posts

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ArcGIS StoryMap:

Student Research Project, Nashua NH

Undergraduate Communication Arts students in “Film History: Theory & Method” at UNH Manchester collaborated on a research project on the history of movie theaters in Nashua, New Hampshire.

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ArcGIS StoryMap:

Student Research Project, Manchester NH

Undergraduate Communication Arts students at UNH Manchester collaborated on a project resulting in a 90-minute self-guided walking tour created with ArcGIS StoryMaps.

tmj journal art
Article Publication:

Mapping Flat, Deep & Slow

Happy to share word of an exciting new issue of TMG Journal for Media History (Vol. 23, No. 1/2, 2020) devoted to the study of “localities” and comparative histories of moviegoing. 

As a work of social history and cultural geography, [Mapping Movies] opens history and film studies to promising new ways of organizing population and exhibition data in the digital sphere.
— McKayla Sluga, Humanities, Arts, and Media
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