Clio Wired (History 696)

In an odd case of syncrhonicity, my parents gave me a map for my birthday last week. Well, it was a globe, which is of course a type of map. It's a beautifully preserved Ran McNally globe from 1959 or 1960 - there's no copyright information printed on it, so I extrapolated the date from the extant countries (one Germany with a white-line division, French West Africa, etc.) Obviously, my parents remembered that I've always had a thing for maps. I think it comes from my earlest reading of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, poring over his intricate atlases of Middle Earth. Subsequent involvement in role-playing games led to further obession with phantasmic representations of geography, and then a scholarly appreciation for actual cartography.

The David Ramsey Historical Map Collection feeds my inner cartophile nicely. As of my viewing, the archive consists of over 12,630 maps from North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. Digitzation began in 1997, with images being scanned in at 300 dpi. Most images average around 200mb, with the largest maps weighing in at upwards of 2 gigabytes. The user is given four options for viewing the collection.

• A standard browser interface
  
• A Java download to run locally on your own system
  
• A GIS viewer that overlays historical maps on current geospatial sattelite imagery
  
• A "ticker" that scrolls random maps at the bottom of the screen, letting a surfer kill some time

The browser interface is fully functional, if a bit slow. I run a fairly robust 2.66Ghz Pentium 4 laptop, with a nice Verizon DSL connection, and my load times were approaching a minute for the larger images. The independent Java application speeds this up, however. Once the user is looking at the collection, the search function allows for selection by date of publication, featured area, country of publication, publisher, engraver, keyword, etc. A search for maps of New York published in London returns seven hits, for example.

Once an image is found, the imaging software is effective. Maps can be enlarged, rotated, minimized, or added to a user's virtual workspace. Multiple maps can be opened at once, allowing for side-by-side comparison. Useful maps can also be saved to an onsite "group" created by the user, to be referenced upon future visits to the site.

Although the site professes to focus on mainly 18th and 19th century American maps, there is some utility for Europeanists. There are 101 maps of Germany available, published between 1704 and 1872. These 101 maps can further be organized by country of publication, allowing a researcher to compare ideas of "Germanness" within and without Central Europe, over the course of one and a half centuries. Naturally, one could trace the rise and fall of the political fortunes of the various HRE electorates, imperial cities, and price-bishoprics. A print archive containing all of these maps would be unlikely to exist, let alone most assuredly prohibitively expensive for an American graduate student to travel to for research. And of course, being able to swap around map files, compare images instantly, and zoom in to your heart's content makes for an easier task than carefully flipping brittle manuscript pages wearing lint-free cotton gloves.

As an interesting aside - the collection is published under a Creative Commons License, as discussed by Cohen and Rosenzweig in Chapter Three of Digital History. By this legal agreement, anyone may use the resources of the collection as long as they attribute the source, the use is noncommercial in nature, and if any changes are made to the information, the user agrees to license the new creation under the same Creative Commons agreement. I find this approach ingenious, charmingly credulous, and plan on using it for all of my digital history.