Locating London’s Past
For this week’s blog post, I decided to explore Locating London’s Past through the lens pertaining to Turnbull’s contention that all maps are perspectival and subjected. The project provides an intuitive GIS, allowing users ‘to map and visualize text and artefactual data relating to the seventh and eighteenth-century London against John Rocque’s 1794 map of London and the first accurate modern OS map’(Locatinglondon.org). The map provides users the freedom of a search function. The function is limited in data it provides.
Historical backgrounds; records of crime, poor relief, taxation, elections, local administration, plague deaths and archaeological finds can all be searched and mapped on this site. The historical importance of John Rocque’s 1746 map of an eighteenth-century representation of the metropolis is placed in juxtaposition to the first accurate OS map of London (1869-80), and a modern Google map environment. The site provides the state of the art representation of London in portraying the city’s growth through history, while simultaneously allowing the user access to search government records to gain further insight to the narrative of London’s passed.
Much of the data is presented as a matter of fact. The data gains validation due to its government roots. The map generated the government records as raw data, which consequently inherit the biases present during the time the data was collected as well as the corruption of the government during that era.
For example, the metadata gathered from the Middlesex Hearth Taxes records attempt to provide information on the status of wealth pertaining to certain neighborhoods in the late 1660s. The data provide an insight to the distribution of wealth and population. It limits the user to search within a particular time frame and does not specify details in the larger housing units. Properties with a larger number of residents are bunched together. Consequently, providing inadequate information of the lower class.
Some information was strategically excluded because the designers decided certain information could not properly be portrayed on a map. As Turnbull’s convention of maps is useful in understanding that in the cites attempt to locate ‘London’s Passed’ they did so in an agriculture perspective. The maps enhance the growth of the buildings, and is subjected primarily to government records to supplement the maps narrating London’s history. The problem arises that much of those records were very constricted by the corruption and knowledge of their times. In communicating the past of London I would find it helpful to include new literature pertaining to those times. In aiding to provide an insightful perspective of what can be dated information.