Blog 6 – Historical Mapping (Nathan Wang)

I overlayed the 1905-1910 map of Northfield on modern-day Northfield. I thought this was pretty easy and was really impressed by the old maps online software, as it only needed 3 points to almost perfectly overlay the maps. Although I don’t go into town much, it is really cool seeing how it has changed over the past 100 years. I wonder how many of the buildings from back then are still standing today? It is also interesting seeing how most of the old roads and blocks line up with the current ones. It would be cool, especially in areas that have changed more over time, to find maps from different periods, overlay them all, and have a way to change their opacities to see how the area has changed. I did not encounter any problems with georeferencing, but if things are poorly labeled in an old map or if the names or locations of things have changed, it may be difficult to find the same location on both maps to create the overlay. Looking at an overlayed map, if something was out of place or had changed a lot, it may be useful to look into why it is different. This reminds me of the historical Carleton project that was shown to us at the beginning of the term, showing what Carleton looked like 100 (?) years ago. Using overlayed maps and records detailing the structure and time built of buildings and roads would make help to make historical 3d models really accurate. Overall, this project was really cool, and I hope to learn about more tools digital humanists use to model the past and present!