https://davidrumsey.georeferencer.com/compare#127712616646
This week, we looked at mapping. More specifically, we looked at spacial humanities and georeferencing historical maps in an attempt to make them more accurate to the real world. This is my first time being introduced to the practice of georeferencing, though it is obviously fundamental in using maps for historical study. With that said, I was surprised to learn that I, as a lay person, am able to (and encouraged to, no less) georeference historical maps from the David Rumsey Map Collection for use by other people. I figured that historical maps were georeferenced by professionals or an AI of some kind, because I thought that crowd sourcing would be too unreliable. Although, as we saw in class with a poorly georeferenced map of France, I was sort of right.
Hands-On with Georeferencing
Pictured above is a map I georeferenced, a map of the world dating back to 1800. I think this map is a great example of how this process isn’t perfect, and it can’t perfectly account for the formatting of a map or how it was made. When I was georeferencing this map, I thought to myself “oh, why doesn’t the software just stretch it over a map of the world to make it more accurate?” but then I realized that doing so would destroy the original map and create a new one. In my eyes, that raises a question; at what point does an altered map become a completely new map? Does georeferencing have the potential to accidentally create an entirely new map?
Now that this map is georeferenced, I imagine the next steps would be to marking points of interest, adding some description of those places, and connecting them with lines. That might be a little hard to do with such a big map, but for a map of a specific place with historical significance, that’s what I would think to do next.
Georeferencing isn’t applicable everywhere, and the biggest example that comes to my mind is a more modern map. Recent maps are likely a lot more accurate than older ones, especially with the ability to take photos from the air.
