Overall, this process was honestly really enjoyable. I chose a random map that was given to me, and it was really fun trying to find where in the world the region on the map was. The title of my map was “Plate 3 Sheet 2 Alluvial Valley of the Mississippi River. Entrenched Valley System,” and here is the link to my map.
All the examples of spatial DH projects that I explored were all nicely organized that made it easy to interact with the maps. This process showed that there is indeed a good bit of work that goes into making these kinds of projects as there are many details you have to be aware of. After completing my map, I found that you are able to export it as IIIF or to GeoTIFF.
When comparing the map which was made in 1944 to the most recent map of the world, I noticed that there were some bodies of land in the southern parts of Louisiana back then that are now covered by water. Although this may be somewhat hyper-tailored towards my map, this opens up the possibility of analyzing ocean levels over time to see how fast ocean levels are rising. I could definitely see this being used for precautionary measures, especially for really small islands that are inhabited by people.
A challenge with georeferencing is that landscapes change over time and do not stay the same. Like I mentioned before, my map contained features that do not exist anymore which made it a little trickier aligning the map correctly. This didn’t overcomplicate the process, it just meant I had to be more mindful about how I was aligning the maps. This process is based on concrete ideas that have been written down previously, so georeferencing would not be entirely appropriate for areas relating to more abstract ideas of the human experience.
