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The availability of extraordinary collections of historic maps placed on line both as static and interactive images leads to high expectations for their creative use in historical narrative and presentation. But a great map hunt detouring from search engines through gateways, museums, and archives chasing links and rephrasing search terms is frustrating. So far, the exciting new worlds of mapping seem relatively unpeopled by historians. Maps do appear on-line as integral parts of both scholarly and public history sites as interactive navigational tools or supplements to the text along with other primary source materials; yet even when elements of interactivity are included, their use is mostly traditional, and maps more frequently illustrate rather than drive the historic narrative. Where the historians are
The exhibit includes off-site links to maps at the Library of Congress and articles on cartography concepts, mapping history and how to read and create maps. One of the most interesting illustrated articles explains differing spatial concepts between Europeans and Native Americans, the probable cultural roots of those differences and their influence on early maps and mapmakers. Within these Walls: 1 house, 5 families, 200 years, also found on the Smithsonian website, maps a house, but mapping is a component of this exhibit rather than than the focus for presenting materials and concepts as it is in the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The house is a two-and-one-half story dwelling from Ipswitch, Massachussetts and the exhibit tells the stories of five families who lived in the house over 200 years. Maps provide a modified virtual tour. Explanatory essays, artifacts and photographs present the context of the time periods in which the families lived from the colonial period through World War II and a map of Ipswitch locates the original home in the town. Clicking on highlighted areas in the floor plan of the house in each generation opens a general description of the room during that time period and leads to photographs of the interior. Although valuable snippets about each time period are revealed through navigating the house floorplan, the use of a map on this site appears more as a tool for interactivity than as a medium of historic inquiry.
Each of the fountains represented an Aesop fable, and as the visitor navigates the site, mouseclicks on these highlighted fountains open windows that recreate the moral lessons from stories such as “The Tortoise and the Hare.” The fables are presented as quatrains written by court poet Isaac de Benserade and translated into English in 1768. An illustration by Sebastien Le Clerc, the court-authorized engraver accompanies each poem. (The garden maze became unfashionable under Louis XVI's reign and was destroyed in 1774.) This is a simple map with simple navigation appropriate to a short article in the Smithsonian Travel magazine, yet it opens up a little-known detail of history, highlights a rare primary source document, and presents spatial relationships and their cultural context. It is also perhaps noteworthy for its comprehensive brevity. |
The
internet offers historians new tablets for mapping human knowledge—not
only of the physical world, but of non-geographic relationships
as well— and new technologies applicable to the internet offer
the possibility of dynamic interaction with this information. Modern
maps can reflect change on a moment-to-moment basis, updating data,
shifting perspectives, and reinterpreting relationships where earlier
maps delineate borders, limits, and static spatial relationships.
The
Smithsonian is catching on. As the title presupposes, maps are the
foundation of the on-line exhibit
The
Lost Labyrinth