This little project was not what I was expecting when I first heard the term spatial humanities, although I enjoyed the process of ‘rectifying’ a map, mostly because I could page through interesting maps. Old maps used to be so colorful (not to say they don’t exist today), but conventional modern maps feel somewhat boring in comparison. Perhaps Old cartographers indulged their creativity too much.
(around 50% transparent)
The one I settled on was originally published in 1881, and it depicts what is the modern day country of Turkey. The process of overlaying the two maps did change my understanding of the previous spatial humanities projects, or at least it left me with some questions. Many of the maps I looked through were either wildly or slightly inaccurate. Spatial humanities projects are made to represent large amounts of information across space during a certain period of time, so what if that representation of space was flawed during that time? How can we be sure we can make correct judgements about history? Adjacently, historians must grapple with this problem frequently. The accuracy of the process also depends on the quality of work done by the user, which can pose a potential problem with georeferencing. The process should also not be applied outside of the spatial humanities, and it would not be helpful answering contemporary questions.
what formats can you access the map you rectified in?
The software allows you to overlay your rectified map over a modern map and adjust the transparency, view the old map by itself or in the website’s collection, and even the json description of the image.
what possibilities do you see once you have a georectified map? What would be next steps?
The most obvious use would be for comparison between new and old maps. We can view the most apparent and more obscure differences between the two. Since modern maps are so accurate, we would really be noting the fallacies of the old maps. I suppose the next step would be to export the rectified map into a more portable format (ie. so it can be represented on other sites). Jumping ahead to Thursday, we add more detail through layers.
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All around good takes. I really enjoyed reading your dissection of the challenges involving layering flawed/inaccurate maps over modern projections. During this assignment, I briefly encountered a map that didn’t really seem to be a map at all, but a sketch of the Sevilla horizon; perhaps the definition of what constitutes a ‘map’ has changed with time? Interesting food for thought. Well done!