University of Missouri - St. Louis

Missouri Crossroads

Missouri Crossroads maps the state’s heritage landscape—connecting over 1,200 historic sites, museums, archives, and community organizations through an open, interactive platform built for researchers, educators, and the public.

What is MOX?

Missouri Crossroads (MOX) is a free, open-access digital platform mapping Missouri’s heritage landscape. We survey, analyze, and connect more than 1,200 museums, archives, historic markers, and heritage organizations distributed across the state—visualizing them through an interactive map designed for use on any device, anywhere. MOX was developed by an interdisciplinary team at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and Saint Louis University, combining expertise in public history, digital humanities, computer science, journalism, and geospatial analysis. The platform is built on Where’s Religion?, an open-source digital humanities project developed at SLU with support from the Henry Luce Foundation, and has been adapted and rebranded for Missouri’s distinctive heritage ecosystem.

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Why it matters

Missouri’s heritage resources are vast—and uneven. Preliminary research identified striking disparities in how heritage sites are represented, resourced, and digitally accessible across the state. Some regions are well-documented; others contain institutions that lack the digital infrastructure, staff capacity, or visibility to reach the audiences they serve. MOX exists to document those gaps and help close them, by giving every site a presence, a data footprint, and a pathway to deeper engagement.

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How it works

MOX combines structured, geotagged data with multimedia storytelling tools. Each site in our database carries standardized metadata encoded to Linked Open Data and Schema.org standards, making it machine-readable, interoperable, and built to last. The platform supports oral histories, crowdsourced content, and participatory archival methods—designed not just to represent Missouri’s past, but to invite communities into the process of documenting it. The platform’s codebase is published on GitHub under open-source licenses (Apache 2.0 / MIT) and is freely available for adaptation by other states, regions, or institutions pursuing similar public history goals.

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