For this week’s reflective blog post, we explored the world of georeferencing. We began by visiting the David Rumsey Map Collection, where we chose a map to play with. I ended up choosing a map that plots the abundance of eagle rays, sting rays, and two different kinds of fish around the world. Originally, my map had six different sections with data about different groupings of animals in each. I decided that trying to plot georeference points on the entire map would be too time consuming and overwhelming, so I clipped the map to just include the submap containing data about the animals I mentioned above. You can view my map here. The picture of the map below shows a generic world map (with my georeference points) overlayed on top of the original map. I enjoyed the georeferencing process, though I found the interface we were working in to be a bit confusing and clunky at times. I also don’t think I got as much out of it as others because my original map was very clearly geographically labeled so transferring georeference points onto the current world map from the original was pretty mindless and straightforward.
Did this process change your understanding of the spatial DH projects you explored earlier?
This process taught me that looking for contextual geographic clues on an original map can help transcribe it onto a modern day map. For example, in the spatial DH projects we explored earlier, certain topographical features were denoted by specific icons or changes in the map’s texture of shading. Noticing this and looking for these types of clues in a map that you need to transcribe can be helpful for translating space onto a new map.
What formats can you access the map you rectified in?
It seems as though you can access my rectified map through GIS applications (like ArcGIS and QGIS), or it can be exported to GeoTIFF, which is a file format made specifically for georeferenced maps.
What possibilities do you see once you have a georectified map? What would be next steps?
Once you have a georectified map, there are many possibilities of what you can do with it. If analyzing an ancient map, tracing georeference points onto a current day map can give insight into some of the historical, environmental, or political factors that influenced the area and led to its state in the present day. It can also be super interesting to just compare what the landscape of an area looked like in the past compared to what it looks like in the modern day and where cities and regions are located in the present. In terms of next steps, doing a deep analysis and making those connections between what stories the relationship between the original map and the georeferenced new map tell can be illuminating.
Are there problems with georeferencing that you should consider?
I think there are some potential issues with georeferencing. There might be cases where old maps contain different countries/empires than modern maps and therefore mapping points across the two maps might be impossible or not representative of the correct regions. I can also envision cases where simply mapping geographic points doesn’t tell the whole story of an area or event. In cases like these, more context and explanation is needed to analyze the map than just the information that georeferencing provides.
What research questions or areas would this method NOT be appropriate for?
For research areas where geographic positioning is irrelevant, georeferencing would be not a productive method to employ. Also, for research questions that seek to answer abstract questions about why society is the way it is, georeferencing might not be the best method. I think georeferencing can be good for visualizing the hard facts about an event, and it can contribute to a larger analysis, but the method alone is not substantive enough to answer big societal questions.
