For the spatial humanities project, I decided to explore a map of Ohio. The link to my map can be accessed here: North Half of Ohio. The map was originally published in 1899 and published by Cram, George Franklin.
Before this week, I rarely used tools for spatial DH projects. However, after using some tools and going through the process, I now see that spatial DH projects are really useful in showing how historical maps can be represented through spatial data. Furthermore, I have grown interested in spatial DH projects as I find it interesting to see how maps and representations of states and towns have changed over time.
On my “This Map” page, I have a variety of options to format and access this app. Firstly, there are a ton of options to use this in GIS, such as Web Map Tile Services, TileJSON, and an XYZ link to get direct access to the site. Furthermore, I can export the file to a GeoTIFF and an IIIF. Lastly, I am also able to save the image as a jpeg, png, etc.
I can imagine a lot of possibilities with this map. Firstly, it can be used with other spatial DH projects to analyze how this specific map has changed over time by comparing it to modern maps of the state of Ohio. Furthermore, this can be used in the field of research when studying how agriculture and architecture of a location have changed over time.
While I am not too familiar with any ethical or any negative biases georeferencing can cause, I can imagine that a lot of maps of locations can be entirely inaccurate depending on the context. As a result, this may skew the results and cause inaccuracy for research questions.
Specifically for digital humanities research, one area of research that I can imagine geo referencing is not useful is when researchers do not need to know the history of a certain location for their studies. In other words, if a researcher solely cared about the modern agriculture of a certain state, town, or country, then having the ability to compare old maps to modern maps could be useless. Finally, since some maps are inaccurate, georeferencing could cause some inaccuracies in the researcher’s studies.
