Locus Tempus

Locus Tempus is an open-source digital mapping platform developed by the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). It leverages a geospatial environment to engage students as repository builders, researchers and curators. Faculty and students in multidisciplinary course environments can collaboratively identify, organize, and visualize geolocated materials within temporal contexts.

The CTL has long engaged and experimented with geospatial visualizations and applications, including Mapping the African American Past, Footprints and Writ Large. Locus Tempus unifies this extensive pedagogical experience into a versatile mapping tool, and demonstrates how collecting and composing materials in time and space sparks deeper learning, surfaces unexpected patterns, and generates new ideas in students.

The Locus Tempus platform integrates with CourseWorks LMS, allowing Columbia instructors to easily set up workspaces for their courses. In these workspaces, students can work together to discover, locate, create, and form analysis on a map. This process taps into visual learning, spatial and temporal thinking, and quantitative skills to help synthesize disparate knowledge, ideas and resources. Students develop a shared vocabulary to categorize mappable objects. The overall experience invites curiosity, encourages exploration and inspires problem solving.

In May 2021, the CTL collaborated with Professor Chris Harwood, a senior lecturer in Czech in Columbia’s Department of Slavic Languages, to integrate Locus Tempus into the instruction of his comparative literature course The Writers of Prague. Through the class use of the platform, students developed a heightened understanding of Prague topography and of the ways that different authors work with existing myths about the city’s history and landmarks and develop new ones.

In February 2023, Locus Tempus introduced two additional features: search and time-filter functionalities. These enhancements allow students and instructors to associate dates with event markers on maps and analyze them temporally. The implementation of these features was a collaboration between the CTL, Professor Ari Goldman and Adjunct Assistant Professor Gregory Khalil of the Journalism School. Professors Goldman and Khalil integrated Locus Tempus into their class, Covering Religion, enabling their students to gain a deeper understanding of the neighborhoods they explored in Israel and Palestine.