Thematic, topographic and demographic maps (among others) are the tools for an overview of Ireland's history from the Ice Ages and the arrival of humans to the 1840s at the Ireland's History in Maps site. The site uses a flat template rather than historic maps as the structure for presenting various data sets and extensive chronologically-based essays on the socio-political history of Ireland.

The subject of the data illustrated on each map is different for each era so that mapped informational categories are not consistent over time, but reflect the dominant theme of the essay with which each is associated.

This site offers potential for mapping comparisons and changes throughout history with the maps as a foundation; however the absence of technology that would make that a visual, interactive process demonstrates its importance by omission. Developing conclusions and tracing thematic concepts through these maps is a lot like thumbing backward and forward in a book using multiple placeholders to keep information straight. On this site, maps are simultaneously navigation tools and a means of illustrating text and this schizophrenia dilutes their usefulness.

The Charles Booth on-line archive Survey into Life and Labour in London (1886-1903) is an amalgamation of primary source maps, police journals primarily from 1898 and an accompanying thesaurus and index of terms. The maps of London streets (Mr. Sid presentations) allow the visitor to situate himself among urban landmarks and topography including cemeteries, workhouses, rivers and canals and churches using zoom and movement capabilities. A sidebar point-and-click map illustration enables movement through the maps without returning to the search engine and a demographic legend explains population poverty classifications.

While the perspective is always that of looking down on a street map, comparative maps from 2000 are introduced to enable observation of changes to the London streets through time. It is a site without interpretive narrative and the extensive, yet focused, maps, documents and photographs and unmediated navigation through the archives allow the viewer to experience history and to determine his own pattern of analysis.

Philip Ethington applies postmodern analytical theories to the uses of mapping and urban history in his interactive essay, “Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge.”  Ethington works from the premise that historical reality is a constantly shifting construction of place, and that in cities, institutions are the linchpins of spatial shifts. In part, this essay explores how mapping these institutions over time can provide an accurate urban historical record. His maps deconstruct the city and allow comparative analysis through layered or multiple views of geography, institutions, structures, and demographics.

It's a heroic effort, and if the maps do not always successfully give up the information they promise, the concept of mapping multiple facets of human activity and organization demonstrating changing spatial relationships over time raises issues well worth discussion.

Future possibilities for historians

Part of the usefulness of the internet to the historian is the ability to rethink the stability of linear narrative and to organize and present concepts and data through multiple viewpoints, discourses and trajectories. Interactive mapping offers these possibilities as well.

With the internet as the medium, new technologies applied to mapping open the possibilities for organizing information—a Derridian deconstruction of images and text introducing new perspectives. Those perspectives are conceptual as well as physical and give map users power to control their own position, visual direction and data selection, all of which influence how we read and write history. Dynamic mapping and the internet platform restructure maps for use as tools for dissolving boundaries rather than freezing them at a single point in time.

But the use of maps to drive historic narrative and as an interpretive tool of topography, events, societies, culture, and even to explore change over time appears infrequently on the web. In part, the expense of some technology and the interdisciplinary sets of skills required to manipulate both history and technology probably circumscribe their proliferation. Basically, however, the internet challenges historians to rethink their use.