The Savvy Technologist

Historical map bonanza

Every once in a while I run across a Web site or some technology tool that really wows me. I had one of those experiences after listening to David Rumsey’s talk at the Where 2.0 Conference via IT Conversations today. Rumsey gave a fascinating talk about the history of cartography and described some of his recent work applying modern visualization technology to 18th and 19th century maps. I heard enough in the podcast to prompt me to visit his site, The David Rumsey Map Collection, and I was richly rewarded for the effort.

With a collection of over 11,000 maps, the site is an amazing resource for students and teachers. Since 1997, Rumsey has shifted his focus from collecting to digitizing and sharing his collection. The result is a Web site that blends gorgeous historical maps with modern GIS tools and provides an easy-to-use interface to locate maps of particular places.

If you’ve got an Java-enabled Web browser (that’s practically everyone) then you might get a something like the following where I’ve done a search for maps of places in Minnesota.

Then I selected a 19th century map of Minneapolis.

Finally, I downloaded the Java applet that provides a modern GIS interface to some historical map data. The following screenshot shows a portion of Lewis and Clark’s journey overlayed with some major highways.

Rumsey provides all of the digitized maps under a Creative Commons license that allows for virtually any non-commercial use. (Have I mentioned lately how much I love Creative Commons?) The uses for this site are so vast that I don’t know where to start. Wouldn’t it be incredible to use some of these maps in iMovie projects about historical events or persons? Let’s see, merging old maps with new data, 3D flybys of early 20th century San Francisco, and on and on it goes. I’ve got an email all queued up for every history teacher in my school district to let them know about this collection.

Tags: cartography, david rumsey, gis, history education