Edinburgh Conference: Working Digitally with Historical Maps

Firstly we'd like to wish all our readers a Happy New Year. Secondly below you will find a summary of the proceedings of the one day conference organised by the Old Maps Online team which was held at the end of 2012.

In December we journeyed north to Edinburgh to hold our second conference on Working Digitally with Historical Maps at the National Library of Scotland. People from a variety of different backgrounds attended, ranging from those already working on innovative ways to use digital historical maps, through those who have digital maps and wanted inspiration on what they could do with them to those just beginning to have an interest who wanted to see what is currently available.

The day was broken in gently at 10am with coffee and an introductory welcome. This was followed by Petr Pridal giving the key note presentation detailing the improved functionality and searching and much extended content of our own Old Maps Online site (we'll let you know when these changes have actually gone live).

Following that Session 1 looked at using technology to map

Detail from Nairn and Elgin, W. Johnson, 1832.
(c) Cartography Associates

history. It started with two staff from the National Library of Scotland, Chris Fleet who detailed the improvements made to their online mapping and catalogue which make it even easier to use and search their collection, whilst Alice Heywood showed us a Moray community project where local people recorded their views on interesting places around Elgin available to visitors through a mobile app. Another mobile app was described by Chris Speed from the Edinburgh College of Art which allows users to download historical maps to compare with their modern day location through the "blue dot" location marker. Peter Munro finished off the first session by describing how the Borders Family History Society have been digitising historical personal records and then mapping addresses from them to show sometimes surprising distribution results of those receiving poor relief. Just before we stopped for lunch there was the presentation of the Bartholomew Globe to Petr Pridal by Bruce Gittings of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, you can read more details about this in our last blog post.

Detail from Scotland SE, E. Stanford , 1901.
 (c) Cartography Associates

Session 2 introduced the concept of visualising spaces, places and routes between them. Richard Rodger of the University of Edinburgh described and demonstrated the function of the tools created as part of the visualising urban geographies project which help those studying history understand the spatial element. Bruce Gittings (also University of Edinburgh) then presented the work of one of his Msc students, Michal Michalski, which combined a range of different data to depict a multi-disciplinary view of historical Perth. Then came two presentations about mapping route ways. David Simpson spoke about his work on digitising the roads drawn on maps of the highlands created by William Roy as a mid eighteenth century Military Survey of Scotland and their accuracy. Neil Ramsay followed with a presentation about mapping paths from old maps onto modern maps online and encouraging people to go out and explore and enjoy these paths.  The final presentation in this session saw Andrew Janes of The National Archives talking about the newly launched BombSight website, another JISC funded project, which maps the locations of bombs dropped in London during part of the Blitz and will feature a mobile app to link this to your location on the ground. Humphrey Southall then demonstrated the website's functionality.

Name detail on the Eye Peninsula of Lewis
in the Outer Hebrides from the OS of
Scotland, Popular Edition, Stornoway, 1925,
 from A Vision of Britain through Time

After a fortifying tea and biscuit break we entered the third and final session focused on using place-names and gazetteers. Ashley Beamer (Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland) spoke about ScotlandsPlaces, their website which brings together place-based datasets from three different partners and which is currently being expanded. Jake King from Ainmean Aite na h-Alba (also known as 'Gaelic Place-Names of Scotland' if, like me, you don't speak Gaelic) spoke about work to extract changing historical place-names from old maps and ways of using a modern map to facilitate access to those historical maps. Another dual presentation by Kirsty Stewart from the University of Edinburgh Library and Neil Mayo from Edina followed as they spoke about a project to digitise the Alexander Carmichael archive and collection and the current phrase to link items within them to places. Paul Ell presented the final paper of the day on the plans of the Digital Exposure of English Place-Names project (also JISC funded) to produce a digital gazetteer using data on variant place names collected by the Survey of English Place Names over the past 80 years.  We then ended the day with a quick thank-you to everyone, especially the speakers. Although we didn't get chance to have a wrap-up discussion as intended, there were many interesting points raised in the questions and comments following each presentation which left us all with plenty to think about.

We'd like to say a big thank-you to everyone for taking the time to come to the conference, as despite being held in the run up to Christmas it was well attended.  Everyone I spoke to during and after the day seemed to enjoy it. We have created a webpage about the conference, it gives the names of the speakers, titles, abstracts and website addresses for all papers plus downloadable PDF copies of both the programme and abstracts.

There is now also a similar page giving information about the previous Working Digitally with Historical Maps conference held in February 2012 at the New York Public Library which launched the initial Old Maps Online website, see here.

Petr Přidal awarded Bartholomew Globe by Royal Scottish Geographical Society

Yesterday we held our second conference on Working Digitally with Historical Maps. The first was held at the New York Public Library in February, and saw the original launch of the Old Maps Online web site. This time we were at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, and included the first public demonstration of the new and improved software for the site. Much more about that and the other presentations next time, but for a quick summary of the day take a look at Edina's Go-Geo blog.

One highlight of the day was a short ceremony at which Bruce Gittings, Vice-Chair of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, presented Petr Přidal, founder of Klokan Technologies and principal architect of the Old Maps Online system, with the Bartholomew Globe. Bruce is wearing the suit, and his speech follows.

"Through its publications and awards the Royal Scottish Geographical Society is pleased to acknowledge and promote notable research, development and innovation within the geographical sciences. Amongst these, the Society awards the Bartholomew Globe, which is named in honour of the notable family of Edinburgh cartographers, who worked in Duncan Street just around the corner from the NLS Map Library. This is given in recognition of an exceptional contribution to cartography, mapping and related techniques.

Today we have already heard from someone who has made a very significant and enduring contribution to online mapping, directly enabling the pioneering work undertaken here in the National Library of Scotland, and in the Moravian Library, in relation to making historical mapping available. This was followed by a significant contribution underpinning projects such as Old Maps Online.

This person is Petr Přidal. Hailing from the Czech Republic, where he gained a Masters in Applied Informatics in 2007 and he finalizes PhD in Cartography now, Petr is a software engineer whose career leaped forward through the springboard of the Google Summer of Code in 2008. He has gone on to found his own company in Switzerland - Klokan Technologies - having set himself the mission of empowering people, companies and institutions, to search, publish and enjoy the real value of the maps they own. For those of you who don't know 'Klokan' is his Czech nickname, meaning slightly bizarrely kangaroo. And there is no doubt that his work 'bounced' the traditional field of historical cartography into the 21st century, underpinning many of the projects we are hearing about today.

Petr has been responsible for innovative software tools including GDAL2Tiles, MapTiler (which permits the seamlessly rendering of maps), IIPImage which provides streaming of high-resolution images, geographical search with MapRank and crowd-sourced georeferencing with Georeferencer. He is strongly of the view that software should be free-and-open-source, and this philosophy has enabled the takeup of these valuable solutions in the often poorly-funded library sector.

It is with the greatest of pleasure I would like to present the Bartholomew Globe to Petr Přidal."

Detail from 1917 Parliamentary Boundary Commission map of Edinburgh (from A Vision of Britain through Time)

AHRC Digital Transformations Moot

Last Monday the project attended the AHRC-moot on Digital Transformations, held at the Mermaid Conference Centre in London. Humphrey Southall represented Old Maps Online and presented a joint display entitled 'Old Maps and the Spatial turn'. Alongside Old Maps Online, this exhibition included Kate Jones (University of Portsmouth) who was introducing the new Bomb Sight website/mobile app (another JISC funded project), Kimberly Kowal (British Library and a member of our steering group) who presented the BL Georeferencer project on which they collaborated with Klokan Technologies and Leif Isaksen (University of Southampton) who was presenting the Pelagios project which links together resources about the ancient world via a gazetteer of ancient places and YAMA a historical map annotator. There was also a display about the Georeferencer Metadata Hub from Klokan.

copyright © 2000 Cartography Associates.

The aim of this joint exhibition was to focus attention on projects working to embed historical maps into modern digital scholarship and exploit the significant general interest there is in old maps. The old map example here was published by Edward Stanford of London in 1901 and shows South East London.

For further information about the day, including a downloadable PDF of the programme see the AHRC website: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Research-funding/Themes/Digital-Transformations/Pages/Digital-Transformations-Moot.aspx

Focus on the Collections: The National Library of Scotland

The next in our series of more in-depth posts about particular collections is focused on the National Library of Scotland's map collection.

The first thing to note about this library is that it has the largest selection of on-line digital maps in the UK with over 44,000 accessible high-resolution images within an online map library in the "Digital resources" section of their institutional website. Of course this is only a small proportion in terms of their total collection of paper maps, but none-the-less this quantity of digital images is in itself a substantial achievement in the digital archives world and identifies the National Library of Scotland as a leading-light in this digital community. The majority of the collection is understandably focussed on Scotland, although there are maps covering the whole of Great Britain included as well.

(c) National Library of Scotland

Within the Library catalogue the maps are grouped by their type and date and are currently divided into those that are georeferenced and those that are not. The maps accessible via Old Maps Online range in date from the early nineteenth Century through into the twentieth Century and all have co-ordinates associated with them. This example is an excerpt from a map entitled 'Lanarkshire, Sheet VI' which  was published in 1865 and shows a much smaller Glasgow than currently exists, but at the same time it also indicates that central areas in the city have been fairly densely populated for over 150 years.

The Library offers the user the option to purchase digital images or printouts of its online maps from them, something many users appreciate. More than this though this library offers the user different ways in which they can browse and access their maps through a range of cutting-edge map technologies. These include a zoomable maps and gazetteer viewer, KlokanTechnologies Georeferencer software allowing users to help add co-ordinates to yet more maps (more on this in the British Library post), a historical maps API which allows users to incorporate material from the Library into their own websites, overlay technology which lets users place old maps on top of new ones, a project which provides mapping tools for historians and of course they also participate in our Old Maps Online project. This extensive repertoire of software applications highlights the commitment of the National Library of Scotland to making their map material available to users in new and interesting ways.

With thanks to Chris Fleet, Senior Map Curator at the 
National Library of Scotland, for his assistance with this post

Old Maps Online - so what?

JISC, who funded Old Maps Online, have requested that we review the success of our project, and how it can be sustained. Here we explore the ways our project has added value.

First and foremost we think we have achieved what we set out to do: creating an online search facility which is easy to use, is full of useful content and links to a wide variety of host institutions. There are a number of different ways we consider the project unique in its success;

• We have created and implemented new MapRank Search software suitable for hosting material from a myriad of institutions
• We have persuaded a range of different digital map libraries from around the world to participate
• We have included maps covering all parts of the whole world
• We have helped some UK libraries add geographical metadata to their digital map images
• We have encouraged all libraries holding maps to think about their metadata in a geographical context
• We have provided a single entry point for searching maps of the same geographical location without the need to know which library holds the actual map
• We have clustered metadata for use in a new way

Of course some of our success is hard to quantify precisely because we are providing an open-access resource. We can look at web usage analysis and count numbers using the website. We can report the stir of positive interest we created when we launched back in February on social networking sites such as Twitter. We can hypothesize that the involvement of so many different host institutions is because we are offering a service which is both open-access for users and free to participate for contributors.

However, we feel that even more than that we have started to influence how libraries think about their geographical holdings. Institutions are beginning to consider how geographical content within their collections can best be made findable and searchable. They are raising questions about the best way to make this content available to their users. Many more institutions have contacted us than are currently contributing saying they would have liked to participate, but that their material as yet does not have a geographical element to its metadata and unfortunately for both them and us it will not be added in time to be included before the end of the current funding for Old Maps Online.

We have proposed a concept and proved it works -- but  this is just one way in which enriched metadata can be used in new ways to simplify online searching.