This week, we’re looking at the spatial humanities, which is one aspect of the digital humanities that I have a lot of experience with. Last term, I took a course (with Austin) that was all about mapping in digital humanities projects, and I had the opportunity to georeference a bunch of old maps using ArcGIS Pro. It was a very tedious process, so I appreciated how much quicker and easier the tools from this week were. First, I used Allmaps to georeference a historical map of Minneapolis. I think it turned out pretty well and I liked how collaborative the site was.
Next, I tried the David Rumsey Georeferencer, which is another community-focused mapping site. I got pretty frustrated with this site because there are some paywalls and I had to make an account. I tried to georeference a randomly generated map, but I had no idea where to start (they were in different languages), so I ended up using a map of Northfield. This one turned out great, but it’s hard to tell because the default (free) settings make the map very dim.
Going through the process of georeferencing historical maps gives me more appreciation for the mapping projects we looked at in class. There’s a lot of time and expertise that goes into those projects and it’s impressive that they are able to produce such attractive final products. Once you have a georectified map, you could compare it to other maps through time. As soon as you have the map image geographically tied, it’s easy to toggle different maps on and off to look at, for example, how infrastructure changed or how a town expanded. On the other hand, this method would not be appropriate for personal stories or some cultural shifts. There’s a lot of nuance and detail that traditional maps don’t capture, and georectifying is primarily effective for traditional, top down, maps.