A large body of scholarship in the spatial humanities and social sciences has illustrated the many benefits of engaging public stakeholders in mapping projects. An aim of many public participatory mapping projects is the integration of quantitative data of ‘official’ sources with community values and perceptions(Fagerholm et al. 2021; Kahila-Tani et al. 2016; Kahila-Tani, Kytta, and Geertman 2019). Public participatory projects have been shown to be valuable tools for the representation of knowledge co-produced between community stakeholders and institutional authorities (Elwood 2008). These projects also actively engage community stakeholders in social processes, such as policy decision making, mapping, and heritage work (Brown and Kyttä 2014; Lafreniere et al. 2019; Tulloch 2008).

Public participatory mapping research has many benefits for both the public and academic researchers. Benefits include empowering public stakeholders in the process of decision making and planning on projects directly impact them (Kahila and Kyttä 2006; Brown and Kyttä 2014b; Kahila-Tani et al. 2016), the ability to contextualize quantitative data with community perceptions (Verplanke et al. 2016; McCall 2021) and the creation of community – researcher partnerships that work to address academic and community problems (Robinson, Block, and Rees 2017; Robinson and Hawthorne 2018).

However, challenges come with these benefits. One major challenge is the need to maintain relationships with public stakeholders. These relationships take time and resources to build, sustain, and grow. Engaging stakeholders in mapping projects has been a continual challenge for the field. It has been thought that the novelty of digital mapping would increase participation in public participatory mapping projects, but Brown and Kyttä (2014) argue that engagement with these projects has been low (averaging 13% response rates in the 5 studies they review) and has continued to stay low. The authors argue that theories of social engagement could increase participation in these projects but have yet to be put into practice. For public participatory projects to reach their full potential they must work to create and grow relationships with a diverse and large volume of stakeholders, creating a need for successful public outreach activities.

Although the need has been recognized, to date, no one has developed a model of engagement that guides researchers on how to create and sustain public engagement in spatial humanities projects. By integrating best practices from the fields of citizen science, public relations and communications, spatial humanities, and public history and interpretation we have created the nested pyramid model of engagement (NPME), a deep mapping public engagement framework that aims to meet this gap. This model offers a clear opportunity to both measure and help design outreach programming that fosters growth in a community-project relationship.

In this paper we move beyond the theoretical and apply this model to a well-established public participatory historical GIS project, the Keweenaw Time Traveler (KeTT), to systematically implement and subsequently analyze the effectiveness of public engagement programs for KeTT.

The Keweenaw Time Traveler (KeTT) is an online historical atlas that encourages and supports public engagement in its robust spatial representation of Michigan’s Copper Country, one of the first major industrial mining landscapes in United States History. The impacts of rapid industrialization and deindustrialization, attributed to the growth and decline of the region’s copper mining industry that took place between the mid-19th century and 20th centuries, has had a major effect on the cultural, social and environmental fabric of the Copper Country landscape (Lankton 1993, 2010; Lafreniere et al. 2019). KeTT was built to empower community stakeholders, public officials, and academic researchers with the ability to gain and share knowledge about how the industrial past of the region impacts the present and to develop discourse about how to leverage this past to create a healthier and more prosperous future.

From its beginning in 2015, KeTT has been seen as a collaborative project focused on the co-production of knowledge between researchers and community stakeholders. The mission of the Keweenaw Time Traveler is ‘…to start conversations about how this region's industrial past continues to affect our lives and identities today. We work to engage residents, descendent groups, researchers, municipal governments, and visitors in the conversation about how to leverage the Keweenaw’s past to create a healthier and more prosperous future.’ Aligning with this mission, community stakeholders were included in the design process of KeTT’s digital interface through many iterations of design charrettes (Scarlett et al. 2018). Stakeholders were also able to contribute directly to the initial building of the historical geospatial datasets contained within KeTT through three PPHGIS applications that helped document historic building use, building material, and transcribe unique notations written on digitized historic maps (Lafreniere et al. 2019). Members of the public have been able to continue to add to the data contained within KeTT through the use of Story Points. Using Story Points, individuals can work to preserve and share their own memories and stories by uploading text, audio, video, images and other multimedia onto the KeTT interface. Their stories are linked to other historical data about the people and places of the Copper Country creating a much more robust and complicated representation of the Copper Country than with just researcher contributed data. Sustained and active in-person programming, at local heritage organization sites, and festivals, along with blog and social media posts have worked to keep stakeholders engaged with the project as it continues to develop. KeTT’s well-established public-project partnership model makes this project an ideal candidate to use to investigate the value of the NPME model as a tool for evaluating and creating outreach programming for public participatory projects.