Technical Implementation and Methodological Approach

The project website is built on WordPress as a content management system and serves as the central technical and methodological foundation for managing, structuring, and presenting the project’s research materials. WordPress was chosen as a stable, widely adopted, and sustainable platform that enables long-term maintainability and accessibility while allowing for a high degree of structural customization.

Within this framework, the project content is organized using custom post types that reflect the conceptual distinction between farms and individual places. Farms and places are modeled as related but distinct spatial entities, allowing different analytical scales to be represented within the same system. While farms function as broader spatial and contextual units, places represent specific locations associated with concrete observations, narratives, and material traces. This distinction enables the project to address both overarching spatial structures and localized experiences within a single digital environment.

Metadata for both farms and places is managed using Advanced Custom Fields, which allows for the structured entry of descriptive, spatial, and thematic information. Each place is explicitly linked to a corresponding farm, establishing a relational data model that supports the systematic organization of content. This structure makes it possible to connect texts, images, and geographic information in a consistent and retrievable way, and it forms the basis for filtering and exploratory access to the material.

Cartographic visualization plays a central methodological role in the project and is not merely illustrative. Using the Leaflet JavaScript library in combination with geographic data from OpenStreetMap, farms and places are displayed together within an interactive map interface. Different marker types are used to distinguish between the two entity types, making their relationship legible at a glance. A search and filter interface integrated into the map allows users to explore the material based on selected metadata criteria, thereby supporting non-linear, exploratory modes of engagement with the data.

In this context, the map functions as a key instrument of digital deep mapping. Places are not only georeferenced but are enriched with narratives, historical accounts, and photographic material produced on site. Photographs taken at specific locations serve to visualize geographic markers referenced in the narratives and to link textual descriptions to visible spatial features. This combination of spatial data, narrative content, and visual documentation enables a multilayered representation of place that integrates qualitative and geographic perspectives.

From a methodological standpoint, the project demonstrates how standard web technologies can be adapted to support deep mapping approaches. The use of structured content types, relational metadata, and interactive cartographic interfaces allows complex spatial relationships and narrative layers to be made accessible without requiring specialized or proprietary software. At the same time, the project highlights the importance of clear data modeling decisions for enabling flexible visualization and analysis.

Overall, the technical setup combines established WordPress functionality with customized data structures and web-mapping components. This results in a flexible and extensible platform that supports the project’s analytical goals, facilitates public dissemination, and ensures the long-term availability of its results. The experiences gained during the project underline the potential of modular, open technologies for implementing digital deep mapping in a sustainable and reusable manner.