This week’s blog post required us to examine a Digital Humanities mapping project and I choose to analyze Locating London’t Past. The website allows for users to “map and visualize textual and artefactual data relating to seventeenth and eighteenth-century London against John Rocque’s 1746 map of London and the first accurate modern OS map.” The website allows one to relate an eighteenth-century representation of the metropolis to the the first accurate map of London and to a modern Google Maps environment. Users can search and map records of the city’s crime, poverty relief, elections, taxation, plague, deaths, local administration, and archaeological finds through the site. The interactive site allows for users to be engaged with the site and feel as though the are walking through the streets of London. With the Google Maps feature, individuals are able to drag a yellow figure and place it on the map, making feel as though you are in London.
The map and data provides insights about London’s historic events and past. In addition, it allows for users to how the city transformed by showing how London grew throughout time. While the site it informative, I believe that those who are not too knowledgeable about London and its past would not find this site very useful. On the other hand, the map would be helpful to historians hoping to geolocate certain events to historic locations and how these locations have transformed in modern times. In addition, assumptions that can be made about the data is a correlation with the events that occurred in a certain place impacts how the city developed around it overtime. The map reveals useful data for historians to see a connection between historic events and their geolocations, but obscures several of London’s time period and other events. In addition, the map neglects to provide insight of London by the people who live there. A different map of London that includes more of London’s past and an interpretation of London by the people living in the city would be useful.
Overall, I believe the site is very informative and engaging. Reading the process of making the site makes me appreciate it even more because to create a version of Rocque’s map as a web resource, 24 separate images of the map had to be combined to create the single image of the map.