For this weeks blog we used the David Rumsey map collection and included Georeferencer to georeference an old map on our modern projections of the world which were created through methods like satellite imaging and tools of the sort. For my georeferencer I originally wanted to do one of my city, when that was not available I settled for one of Montevideo in Uruguay, however that one was perfectly mapped onto today’s standards, so I decided to go the recommended way which is to map a random map given to me by the collection. It gave me this map of the United States of America.
I don’t believe that this process change my understanding of DH since it in a way felt similar to mapping a 3D object, even if the direct approach was different, the level of detail that is needed to properly create the map felt similar to creating a 3D representation of Steve Lewis’s bobblehead. So if anything it helped me expand my understanding of it, rather than change it.
One of the things I like about this tool is that it has direct implementation with other GIS apps and different formats to export it in which make it great for exploration in other DH contexts. I feel like that is great because it might make it easier to interpolate with other data, for example in the case of having a population dataset for the period of time of the map then we could create a scatterplot of where the biggest population areas would be.
I don’t believe there are any problems with georeferencing maps, we might uncover things that we don’t like, such as the fact that there was (and still is) racism in the world and that is reflected in the way that populations develop. It is not necessarily a problem of the maps themselves, the maps present issues that we need to tackle and solve, but they are not problematic in essence, they are a representation of our grim reality.
To conclude I don’t think that there are questions or areas that we shouldn’t apply this type of research to, in fact we need to apply it to everything, especially those things that make us uncomfortable to acknowledge, that way we can uncover the faults that we as a society still partake in and find ways to fix them to make a better world.
