https://www.oldmapsonline.org/maps/5169b4f4-6fd4-55e2-b2d0-efbec7316dcc/
Above is a link to the map I worked on. I placed an historic map of Amenia, New York over modern day Amenia, New York.
This exercise was quite interesting to me. I had some experience with geo rectifying maps even thought I did not know it. My high school AP Human Geography teacher had shown us maps like this for work he was doing towards his masters in Scottish history.
As for possibilities I see after finishing the project, I think this definitely has strong potential has a teaching and learning tool. Similar to what my high school teacher showed me, when discussing historical places in class, teachers could show the modern day maps of those places overlayed with historical maps of those places. It is a create visual way to learn. To actually see the maps of ancient places over familiar modern maps is invaluable. As far as where this can go, I think the technology could become more accessible. The available technology is a bit clunky, but if that were worked out, it would be an amazing tool in classrooms.
While georeferencing is very cool, there are a couple of limitations and problems in presents. Old maps often do not always align with new maps, making lining maps up virtually impossible. This is especially true when in comes to very old maps. People from centuries ago just did not have the same technology we do today. They could not know the exact shape of landmasses the way we can. Another problem is access to old maps. Old maps that came about before the creation of the Internet have to be digitized in order for georeferencing technology to be applied to them, and many are hidden away in random places. Finding these old maps is an arduous task.
As I mentioned earlier, a lot of older maps tend to be factually incorrect. This means that if you are trying to conduct historical research with an old map, or really any 2D map for that matter, you must acknowledge its faults and limitations. No map is a complete perfect picture of what the world is or looks like.
This process did change my view on earlier spatial digital humanities projects. It was cool to see how people’s views of their surroundings change over times. Old maps tell a different story than new maps.
2 thoughts on “Georeferencing Blog Week 6- Max Votruba”
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I really like how easy your post was to understand. I don’t really know much about maps since I never took any sort of geography classes beyond the required courses but, reading how you interpreted the map helped me understand why people would make a map to show different data. Great work!
Hello!
I enjoyed reading your post about your experience with georeferencing and your overall thoughts about the subject. You made a really good point about comparing new maps and old maps that I agree with. If individuals could see old and new maps of a specific location then it would help them visualize the changes more clearly. It would also be easier to understand the changes this way. I like how you said, “old maps tell a different story than new maps.” This is important because the styles of maps have changed over time and they uniquely tell their own story.