Using the David Rumsey Georeferencer, I laid a map of Massachusetts in 1838 onto the US which you can view here. This is what my map looked like:
At first, I did not really understand the practicality of spatial humanities as I questioned why you would need to use an older map over its current map. After going through many different maps on David’s website I began to understand why and actually found it to be pretty interesting. Seeing old locations and battle sites was fascinating since our current maps tend to always be oversimplified. Seeing these specific parts and details of every region was much more fun than I would have anticipated.
The different formats it appears you can access this map is in a view, info json and website format from which you can do many different things with such as viewing the map in a much higher quality, export it, or even purchase it.
The possibilities of having this georectified map is being able to view where the different regions of Massachusetts align with today’s Massachusetts. One really cool feature David has is the ability to fade in and out the georectified map and that way you can really see where the different parts of Massachusetts align.
One problem I noticed is that, at least for this example the maps don’t exactly align perfectly. You can see on the right side of Massachusetts that the tail end of it extends further on the current map. This could be from a scaling issue or from just shift over time but I could see it being a bit of an issue. Obviously the map is from over 150 years ago so of course it won’t be perfect.
One con I can see of this method is having bad accuracy. If you were to use an inaccurate map to use for georeferencing the information could be inaccurate and lead to misinformation. Also, it appears that most websites would be like a third-party (so not the actual source of the maps) which I could see potentially some information being lost in translation.
