This week we were tasked with georeferencing historical maps and exploring spatial digital humanities projects. I’m currently working on a spatial digital humanities project in Classics, so I feel a bit more familiar with spatial DH than I am other methods. What was mostly new to me was the georeferening we did of historical maps, and it was an interesting process. The one I did in class was a elevation map of the Swiss Alps, all in German, that took a minute to figure out where I was and what it was representing. There were basically no cities or towns on that map so I used the lakes and mountain markers for that, trying to match contours on each map as precisely as I could. I forgot to share the map so I don’t have that one, nor the few I did after that, which were all of Siberia and in Russian. The map I ended up with is one of Germany and the surrounding countries. I put down 8 points in total on cities, but I think the maps are slightly different projections as there are still parts that don’t line up very well. Here’s a picture of both maps side by side and then overlayed:
The projects I looked at were a.) mostly broken or b.) didn’t use historical maps, so the process of georeferencing these maps didn’t really effect my view of them. However, I do see both the advantages and disadvantages of making these historical overlays. You could potentially see things like coastline change, which could reveal new settlements, or even see settlements move. But the lack of absolute precision that making these maps involves, especially if these maps are in other languages, hinders their usefulness in those contexts.
I think that while this process could benefit many projects there are certain ones that it wouldn’t. The project I work on traces modern adaptations of Medea by Euripides, and it would be impractical to have historical maps as most of the adaptations are relatively modern and we already textually explain the socio-political and historical contexts of each play. I think it would just clutter everything up. I do think historical map overlays could be useful for other projects, especially for more modern period projects to show change.
