Maps and views blog

2 posts from November 2012

14 November 2012

Links with OS past

Today I was visited by Neill and Anna Hill.  Anna is the descendant of Robert Dawson through her mother while her father was the last director of OS when it was still entirely staffed by the military!  I showed her one Ordnance Surveyors' Drawing drawn by Dawson showing the countryside around Stratford on Avon and another showing Snowdonia in 1816.  The latter is regarded by some as his masterpiece because of his sensitive rendering of the mountain peaks - a sensitivity which many have linked to the romanticism of the period and thus a cartographic equivalent of the poems of Wordsworth and the paintings of Turner.

02 November 2012

Annoucing BL Georeferencer champions

All the maps in this latest round of BL Georeferencer were completed yesterday, 1 Nov, thus producing second lot of of the Library's historic maps that know where they belong. A related result was the amicable conclusion of the weeklong point leapfrogging between the two top participants, Sue White and Maurice Nicholson.

A heartfelt "thank you" to Sue and Maurice for their dedicated work! In what must have been mutual design or compromise, each contributed precisely 3,300 points over the course of the six days. This impressive number is evident in the high quality of the georeferencing they produced, and will be enjoyed by users overlaying the maps in future. 

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This Christopher Saxton map of Kent, Sussex, Middlesex and Surrey was assigned a mind-boggling 398 points, more than any other map!

A quarter of the maps were georeferenced with 3-5 points, with more than half of the maps sporting between 6 and 30 points. Less - ~18% - have between 30 and 100 points at present, such as this 1928 OS map of the south west coast of Wales (38 points).

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Thanks to all the volunteers that assisted in the BL Georeferencer effort. We will see their work added to Old Maps Online in future, where maps from numerous collections can be searched geographically and by time. Before that, however, we have some error-checking that I'll be looking for help with... stay tuned!