I knew that the aim of spatial DH projects is to bring locations to life with ideas and information from various concepts and time periods, but I didn’t know the extent/limitations of what was possible with it until looking at these projects and completing one of my own.
The map I chose to rectify is a map of 1878 southern Tuckahoe, a town that sits alongside the Tuckahoe River that flows East through Ocean City, New Jersey. The original map contained both north and south Tuckahoe, but I chose to geo-map the southern side (I could only choose one).
It was a bit of a struggle to get the map to align right with the streets in the modern map. When I got the river to align, the streets were off by a slight bit, which brings up a few questions. Was the map not properly drawn in scale? Has the river or streets moved slightly between 1878 and now?
This map can be exported in many ways to be used in geographic information systems. It can be exported as a web map tile service (WTMS), an XYZ coordinate system, and as a Tile JSON format. It can also be exported as a GeoTIFF, a version of a TIFF file which is used to store raster graphics and image information.
There are so many possibilities when connecting two different maps together. Geo-mapping can connect two maps that aim to show multiple different things, and it can connect maps from different time periods, allowing for multiple different ways for us to explore and analyze the relationships between certain things geographically.
The issue with georeferencing is the fact that most locations that are of interest for geo-mapping are constantly changing. Let’s say we are able to instantly make a georeferenced map of satellite images to Earth. That image is accurate now, yes, but 30-40 years from now there will be lots of changes to land and infrastructure, rendering the map we’ve made obselete.
