Did this process change your understanding of the spatial DH projects you explored earlier?
I looked at ‘How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage’ and I don’t think the process of making this particular map changed my understanding of that project. It seemed like the processes would be very different. The map I worked on was based on overlaying two maps together by identifying matching locations. Then one map will be overlaid over the other. The map of this project looks like it was made some other way. It has the counties in the United States colored by how likely a person living there is to be married by age twenty-six and each visualization is one map, not one map laid over another.
Examine the This Map page: what formats can you access the map you rectified in?
The map can be exported to GeoTIFF, as IIIF, and can be used in GSI
What possibilities do you see once you have a georectified map? What would be next steps?
After making a georectified map, it’s easy to toggle between the old map and the new map. I made my map with the Minnesota Department of Highways’ 1968 map of the Municipality of Northfield, Minnesota. The river was shaped differently, especially at the ends and some of the roads don’t align, but a surprising amount is similar between the two maps. This project actually made me think more about how this type of technology can be used for images of buildings or objects as opposed to maps. I liked the ‘Swipe’ and ‘Spyglass’ viewing methods the most, though I found most of the options for viewing the two maps have their own difficulties. I liked how they revealed glimpses of the old map and I think it would be interesting to apply the same technology to images of buildings to compare how they looked before as opposed to now. It could also be used for artifacts and revealing what they look like restored or in a 3D model.
Are there problems with georeferencing that you should consider?
As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t find any of the comparison methods to be particularly easy to read. The ‘Swipe’ and ‘Spyglass’ modes both have the shortcoming that you can only look at a specific aspect in one of the maps at a time. ‘Overlay’ allows for both to be seen at the same time, but it can be hard to differentiate one from the other at times, perhaps if the maps were more contrasting, especially in color, it would be easier to read. Finally, ‘Grid’ allows for a side-by-side comparison, I found this to be the easiest way to compare the maps. It is also harder to use when the image laid over the map is blurry or extremely different from the maps we use today.
What research questions or areas would this method NOT be appropriate for?
At first, I thought the method would be unsuitable for art history, but I think the ‘Swipe’ and ‘Spyglass’ viewing methods would work really well to showcase restoration work or show things like X-rays of paintings. I still do not think this would be very applicable in literature.
