What does it mean to truly look closely? This year’s VRA annual conference, Zooming In, invites visual resources professionals to shift from the wide view and settle into the details, the workflows, tools, discoveries, and community conversations that define our day-to-day practice.
Delivered fully online, VRA 2026 brings together a rich program drawn from 40+ proposals spanning panels, lightning talks, virtual tours, and more. Whether you’re navigating new roles in your institution, exploring how AI is reshaping cataloging and metadata work, grappling with collection development decisions, or finding new ways to activate and engage communities through visual collections, there’s a session built for where you are right now.
This year’s program reflects both the breadth and the depth of our field: from digitizing ancient scrolls to first-time service management, from reparative description to classroom pedagogy, and interactive digital maps. It’s a conference for asking: what happens when we look more carefully?
Join us to learn, connect, and zoom in.
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Putting It into Geographic Context: Digital Mapping Projects in the Humanities Classroom Moving beyond black backgrounds, digital mapping tools now allow students to ground architectural structures and cultural heritage objects in geographic context. This 60-minute panel presents three case studies using platforms such as ArcGIS and Omeka to create maps and illuminate spatial narratives.
Once upon a classroom, students studied architectural structures and cultural heritage objects in a relative vacuum — outside of a quick map projected at the start of a lecture, black backgrounds and silver tape did little to ground these works in geographic context. As digital maps and mapping tools have become increasingly prevalent, including since the launch of the transformative Google Earth in 2005, faculty and students now have access to sophisticated yet user-friendly digital mapping tools that allow them to explore geographic context and study adjacencies between works like never before. Mapping, storytelling, and digital exhibition tools such as Google Maps, ArcGIS and StoryMaps, and Omeka highlight placemarks and illuminate narratives — from the development of modernist architecture, to photographic depictions of a place over time, to the provenance of a painting. These three presentations detail case studies of pedagogically-focused mapping projects that are user-friendly and easily adapted to the classroom.
JJ Bauer (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) will discuss transitioning a modern architecture course project from Google Maps to ArcGIS.
Amy McKenna (Williams College) will speak about a project in Omeka, where students build and map a collection of photographs and curate a digital exhibition focused on the depictions of one place in the Middle East over time.
Otto Luna (University of New Hampshire) will describe a project in which students investigate the provenance of artworks by creating an interactive ArcGIS map and then developing a multimedia narrative in StoryMaps.
