Open Historical Maps
Crowdsourcing, Open Source GIS,
and the Research Web
SHEKHAR KRISHNAN & SCHUYLER ERLE
Harvard ABCD GIS Group, 15 April 2009

Where?

How to Bring Geography Back into Humanities?
Back of the Book Problem
Maps as Illustrations, not Arguments
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Web of References and Locations in Research
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Geography and Bibliography as Tacit Knowledge
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History, Ethnography and GIS
Disappearance of Geography from Social Science
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Lack of Training and Technical Dependence
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High Social Theory versus Empiricism of GIS
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History as New Media
Digital Humanities and History
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Web Archives and Digital Libraries
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Amateur Enthusiasm and Hacking
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Open Source Software Development
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http://chnm.gmu.edu

History Web + Geospatial Web
History Web
Zotero 1.0 – Capturing Citations and Publishing Bibliographies
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Zotero 2.0 – Sharing Collections and Scholarly Collaboration on the Web
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Zotero Maps
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Geospatial Web
Gutenkarte – Geographic Text Browser
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NYPL Map Rectifier – Georeferencing Historical Maps
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NYPL Map Digitizer – Vectorizing and Annotating Historical Layers
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Gutenkarte
http://gutenkarte.org
Zotero
http://www.zotero.org

NYPL Map Rectifier
http://dev.maps.nypl.org/warper/users/8
http://dev.maps.nypl.org/warper/mapscans?
field=title&query=Queens&show_warped=0
http://dev.maps.nypl.org/warper/mapscans/8124

NYPL Map Digitizer
http://dev.maps.nypl.org/digitizer/www/nypl/view2.htm
http://dev.maps.nypl.org/warper/mapscans/activity

Geospatial Web
Open Source GIS
OpenLayers
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GDAL, GeoServer, PostGIS
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Geospatial Web Services
WMS
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WFS
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KML
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GeoRSS


http://osgeo.org

Crowdsourcing?
“I find the term incredibly irritating... Any
company that thinks it’s going to build a site by
outsourcing all the work to its users not only
disrespects the users but completely
misunderstands what it should be doing. Your
job is to provide a structure for your users to
collaborate, and that takes a lot of work”.
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia

http://openstreetmap.org

http://openstreetmap.org

8 Reasons Some Wikis Work
1. Clear goal
2. Worth doing
3. Objective standards
4. Made from small pieces
5. Each piece is useful
6. Segmented subjects
7. Personally useful
8. Enjoyable work

Collaborative Best Practices
Public Editing
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Identity
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Profile
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Keeping Score
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Revision History
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Commentary
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Provenance
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(Geo)RSS Feeds
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Change Tracking
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Rollback
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Open Historical Maps
Crowd Control
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Curators Designing Historical Schemas
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Versioning and Resolving Disputes
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Time Travel
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Time in GIS
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Chronological Annotation of Features
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Disambiguation
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Geographic, Toponymic and Chronological Ambiguity

Open Gazeteers
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NYPL Maps Beta
http://dev.maps.nypl.org
SHEKHAR KRISHNAN
shekhar@mit.edu
SCHUYLER ERLE
schuyler@entropyfree.com
Entropy Free LLC