As I was clicking through different maps on the David Rumsey site, I had to skip 3 different maps until I found one that I recognized. Even though I couldn’t really understand what was written, I was able to immediately recognize the European coastline.
All of the points I had selected to match the maps fell on the coast because those are the points I could easily match together. Due to matching points only on the coasts, the whole left side of the map matched up fairly well on the modern map, but the right side didn’t match up as well as I would have hoped.
While I found the process to be fairly easy once I was able to find identify the location, I can think of a few limitations to this process. The first limitation I thought of, and the reason I skipped over a couple maps, is that it could be very hard to identify the current location if the original map is written in a different language without any identifiable landmarks. Another limitation I thought about is that the scale of the original maps may not align to the modern one and proportion of landmass could be off along with a change in countries borders making it much harder to interpret the original map. While this makes the process more difficult, it could be beneficial to historians who are curious about coastal changes and how country borders have changed over many years.
While I think this could be great for a lot of broader projects to show general change over time, but it may not be so great for more specific projects that require more precision since the overlay process makes it a bit difficult to perfectly overlay the maps due to a lack of precision in the past and issues with the scale of the map.
