Rescaling the Past through Mosaic Historical Cartography

Abstract

Researchers of our past have long used historical maps to place events and to uncover the physical form of an area. A series of maps may be employed to understand a region beyond the extent of a single map. However, rarely are these maps included in publications of research findings. At best, a modern cartographic reproduction will be created to depict the research area. Our maps, created for a historical atlas of Sandwich, Ontario, Canada, are noteworthy for their use of original historical maps in a mosaic to recreate the past. Our objective was to overcome the international boundary between Canada and the United States, a borderland that has succumbed to vast generalizations on the part of the cartographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the use of ArcGIS, we georectified and fixed the extent of our maps, creating a series of maps that depict the changing urban growth of Sandwich over 200 years. This methodology can be extended to allow for the cartographic visualization of economic, political, social and spatial relationships that exist beyond a single map.

Tracking a city’s center of gravity over 500 years of growth from a time series of georectified historical maps

“…Our analysis reaffirms the value of using georeferenced historical maps as a way to understand how a city has grown and developed through time (Lafreniere & Rivet, 2010;Liu et al, 2018;Maio et al, 2013;Pindozzi et al, 2015). The process of georeferencing historical maps will always leave residual errors (Tucci & Giordano, 2011) resulting from factors such as the cartography and surveying techniques used when the map was drawn, the deformation of paper over time, and whether a previous mosaicking operation was performed (Brovelli & Minghini, 2012).…”

Using Historical Maps within a GIS to Analyze Two Centuries of Rural Landscape Changes in Southern Italy

“…According with Lefreniere and Rivet [29], working with historical maps is necessary in order to include many different aspects and problems that occurred over time. The first step has been to digitize the maps with a scan.…”

Structure-from-Motion (SFM) Photogrammetry as a Non-Invasive Methodology to Digitalize Historical Documents: A Highly Flexible and Low-Cost Approach?

“…• State of conservation of the map, • map-sheet thickness [9], • sensitivity to light [10], • map format [11]: Through centuries, maps have been realized in a different format in length and width, • map non-flat material [12,13]: The map could have suffered deformation of the support resulting corrugated. In other cases, the maps could be framed in a rigid wooden structure (as in the map presented in this case study), • map accessibility [9,10]: It is common to find a map that has been painted on an entire wall, for example, in monasteries or royal palaces.…”