Introduction
For my midterm project, I decided to georeference a map. An old map of South America caught my attention as it looked quite different than our modern maps. The original map is ‘South America divided into its IIII principall parts [1684]’ from Allmaps Editor.
Sources
For this project, I used Allmaps Editor to both find a map in the Leventhal Map & Education Center collection and to georeference the map. Due to the nature of this project there was no data cleaning necessary. Even though there was no data cleaning, I had to make sense of the meta data and the map in order to understand the contexts and insights it may provide.
Processes
On Allmaps Editor, there were many maps to choose from (construction, infrastructure, geographical, etc.). Once I had this map, I used Allmaps Editor to georeference this historical map. This is when I noticed the original map was stretched much wider than South America on a modern day map. This presented a bit of a challenge georeferencing. I had to match up several points along the land-sea border, but even then, the alignment was not perfect, but I did my best to match points on the historical map to a modern day map.
From this, I took the map using the XYZ url and embedded it into ArcGIS Online map editor. I had several ideas of how to proceed, but ended up tracing the borders of the countries on the historical map and overlaying them ontop of a modern-day map. Even though, due to the distortion of the map, the land-sea borders fail to line up properly, the shift in country borders can be clearly seen. I set the transparency of the original map low enough to see the current map, but high enough to be able to see the original historical map. I then added a feature for each outlined country that when clicked, the historical name pops up, as well as the countries that lie within the historical borders. While, this may be slightly inaccurate due to distortions (more on this in the significance section, it provides a decent approximation to how country boundaries have changed over time.
Presentation
When designing my georeferenced map, I wanted the historical borders to be the most prominent, with secondary information available at a closer look. With a light and plain base, map, both the historical map’s, and current map’s country borders may be seen. The pop-up aspect that I included, allows more devoted users to have access to which countries used to belong to other countries. I decided to embed my web app at the top of this page so that user’s could explore the map prior to learning about my process and map construction.
Significance
By analyzing a map in the way I did, it allows us as humans to gain a better understanding of how society was split (regionally) in South America. While solely based on this map, we are unsure of the causes, with a bit of extra information we can contextualize such a map.
One of the first things about this map that caught my attention was that present-day Panama (my home) is split into two regions. Knowing this map is dated 1684, we can infer that this map shows South America during its colonization. This can help us understand which current countries gained independence from which other countries. All of this information is available online, however, it is quite cool to be able to visualize the contrast of the past and present all in one.
The shifts in regions may seem quite significant, but it is important to remember, that this map holds inaccuracies in the comparison of historical and modern maps. These inaccuracies originate from my georeferencing errors, but also from comparing two different maps. The historical map was likely drawn flat, whereas it is being overlaid on a modern-day map (which is based off the Mercator projection, distorting proportions of country size). This project captures the essence of the Digital Arts & Humanities as it is a perfect blend of understanding and analyzing history with the use of visual representations and digital tools to tell a story of how the past and present come together to give us a more fulfilling understanding of human history.