Sometimes the map that's leftover, that no else wants to decipher, is the most valuable to georeference.

In my periodic checks on BL Georeferencer http://www.bl.uk/maps/, I've noticed that the more opaque, difficult to discern maps are avoided - and this is entirely understandable! Associating the places that appear on historic maps with their current geographic location on the ground can be straightforward, but not always. Here are a few of those more demanding:

This 16th c. drawing required reading the title and description to get any idea of where or what it was - there is no text on the map!

This ca 1600 map of Shopshire is nicely labelled, but requires some interpretation.  Shewsbury is labelled "Salop", an historical name for the city, and scale varies over the map: the loop of the river on which the city is located is of an inordinately large scale, but this emphasises its prime geographic feature making it firmly recognisable.

Thanks to Steven Feldman for taking on these two.

Below are a couple I am less certain will make it...

Numerous maps from the Kensington Turnpike Trust are available, and all seem to be difficult to move. This, sheet 6, has even less information than most!

 

No one has dared attempt this estate map of "the manors of Mincingbury, Abbotsbury and Hoares, in Barley, Hertfordshire." If anyone can figure where this might be located, please help!

What makes the difficult maps especially valuable to georeference is their very obscurity; because most folks will not know what they represent, they are made less useful. Once their location is known, they are able to be found and used as maps. 

My thanks and admiration go out those participants in the BL Georeferncer project that accept the challenging maps!

It was only this morning that a new set of 700 maps was opened to the public for georeferencing, but this afternoon I am overwhelmed at the interest we've received. Participating individuals examined the scanned maps closely - many of which were not easy to decipher, being of an earlier and more "characterful" sort - and, using an online gazetteer and map, found and assigned their locations. Amazing.

There is plenty left to do. Please give it a try!

http://www.bl.uk/maps/

Once a map has been georeferenced with this tool, it may be viewed overlaid on the landscape, and each participant is credited for the number of points they submit.  

But it is not all about immediate gratification and competition! Georeferencing these maps extends their usability and findability, and allows visualisation in new ways using popular geospatial tools. The British Library has tremendous collections of historic maps that, without georeferencing, lack visibility via digital technologies, so we decided to crowd-source the activity. All the data created from this effort will be used for enhanced searching; the results of our initial pilot (thanks to those volunteers) have already been applied in Old Maps Online (http://oldmapsonline.org) and we have plans for our own uses.

Had he not died, Gerard Mercator would be celebrating his 500th birthday today.

But why should death stand in the way of a birthday celebration for a significant historical figure? Mercator (1512-1594) has enjoyed more than his fair share of posthumous parties – it feels like the clear-up has only just been completed after the one celebrating the 400th anniversary of his map projection (1969, if you can remember). 

This way of commemorating/connecting with the past often tells us more about those doing the celebrating than the figures themselves. In fact, one often finds, looking closer, that the personality is nowhere to be seen, obscured by what they and their achievements have come to represent.

Take Mercator. Regarded as the first modern mapmaker, he created (in 1569) a world map upon which navigators, for the first time, could draw a straight line and actually travel along it without the curvature of the earth messing up their co-ordinates.

Big news for those European nations wanting to get across the sea to where all the gold was, as well as those to whom the gold at that time belonged. Yet the subsequent implication of Mercator in the ideology of colonialism and empire probably disguises, even misrepresents, far less political and controversial motivations.

So, in place of the party streamers and jelly and ice-cream, here are ten interesting facts about a 500 year old mapmaker from Belgium which might be true.

1. Mercator’s name wasn’t really Mercator but Gerard Kremer. Mercator is the Latinised form of Kremer.

2. He wrote the definitive manual on italic writing.

3. He once took 6 years to reply to a letter.

4.  A Protestant in the Catholic Spanish Netherlands, Mercator was arrested and tried as a heretic.

5. He didn’t produce the first book of maps, but the first book of maps to be called an ‘Atlas,’ in 1595. The title stuck.

6. His Atlas wasn’t named after the mythological Titan son of Jupiter Atlas, but the mythological astronomer king of Mauritania Atlas. Silly.

7. Atlas bombed commercially when it was first produced.

8. He never visited England, but produced the biggest and best map of the British Isles in 1564, using inside information from someone whose identity is still shrouded in mystery.

9. His unique hand-made atlas of Europe of 1570-2 was discovered in 1967 and purchased in 1997 by the British Library.

10. The maths of his world map projection is still in use today, most notably by NASA and Ordnance Survey.

… and there’s also a display of Mercator’s maps, atlases and letters in the British Library’s Sir John Ritblat Gallery, until the end of May.

The crowdsourcing effort described in my last post was, I am happy to say, complete in less than one week. Many thanks to all that participated! Maurice Nicholson of Bedford submitted the most maps, and he will be in for a visit to the British Library in a couple of weeks.

Below is a visualisation of the maps completed (before any error-checking!)

All of the maps in the project are still open for editing. Adding more points - spread across the entire map - will improve the accuracy of the data. From here, simply click on the red marker representing the map you wish to edit to enter the Georeferencer tool. If you have local knowledge of an area, we'd appreciate you reviewing what's there to ensure the best fit and minimise errors.   

Because of the quick work, the newly-georeferenced maps were integrated into the JISC-funded Old Maps Online, in which The British Library is partnering, in time for its launch. More on that soon...

Get in touch via [email protected] if you wish to be contacted when the next batch of maps is ready for georeferencing.

We're asking the online public to undertake a task beyond our own means: to georeference some of our treasures of British mapping. http://maps.bl.uk

The maps included represent a very small sample, to be sure. But the the Ordnance Survey Drawings are some of the most enquired-after maps we have, being unique manuscript documents that portray the lanscape of England and Wales before the onslaught of industrialisation made its mark.

  
This is a detail of OSD 40, pt. 3. In 1801, Exeter was a small and compact town!

The other collection we've included in this effort is a selection of the Crace Collection of Maps of London. I've found these maps to be more difficult to georeference, and am eager to see how others fare with them.

The project web page is http://maps.bl.uk - there is a short video there and detailed instructions. Access is also available from within the map pages in the Online Gallery. Please try this new tool out, as it will be a great help towards improving access to and visibility of these collections!

 

There’s nothing like a cup of tea to get the day off to a good start. Tea could almost be marketed as the elixir of life.

During this morning’s cuppa I could well have been reminded of a fine map of 1940 by the British artist MacDonald Gill, entitled ‘Tea Revives the World.’

The map was commissioned by the International Tea Market Expansion Board, its aim to promote wartime strength, Allied resolve and international trade during World War II through a celebration of Britain’s adopted national beverage.

Imperialistic connotations aside, this is an enormously enjoyable pictorial history of tea, packed with observations and bizarre facts to support tea's mythology. 

The serene and U-boat-less North Atlantic in 1940 conveniently ignores the submerged reality. Equally unsurprising, given its date, the map is especially amenable to those notorious tea-disposers the U.S.A.

The map was included in our Magnificent Maps exhibition of 2010 At the time I recall great enthusiasm for copies of the map to be made available to buy. Unfortunately, we just weren’t able to do so. Until very recently, you still just couldn't get what you wanted.

However, I’m pleased to say that copies of the map are now available to purchase from the British Library shop and online, in this month of December with stockings still to fill.  So let's hear it for tea, and the tea-map, and its redoubtable resolve! 

The British Library’s latest exhibition, Royal Manuscripts: The genius of illumination is now open and well worth a visit. The show features a great number of medieval illuminated miniatures, and manages somehow to meld the solemn with the spectacular, with a lion’s skull thrown in for good measure. Follow the blog. 

I was especially pleased to see a group of mid-thirteenth century maps by the Benedictine monk Matthew Paris, which were included in the exhibition due to their being manuscripts formally owned by royalty. We don’t get these maps out for anyone you know

 

and the inventive way in which they've been displayed means that you will never get a better chance to see them, front, back, and sides.

I'd like to dwell on one of these maps, which shows a journey from London to somewhere in France on the way to Rome, because it illustrates some oft repeated but still interesting points.

Firstly, it is as much a diagram as a map: words and lines placed in their correct location to each other. Maps are just that, diagrams. Even this one below, one of the best known M. Paris maps. Its essentially a word diagram with a wiggly coastline drawn around it.

Secondly, the tiny illustrations for places are some of the earliest surviving pictures of these towns. Maps are just that, pictures.

Thirdly, just because this map shows a route doesn’t mean to say it was taken on that journey. Travel can be imaginative as well as physical, and anyway, Benedictines don’t generally stray far from home.

Finally, doesn’t it look just like what you see on a sat nav? Same language, different means, very relevant.

Until recently, if you asked Google Maps to direct you to the British Library it would instead whisk you straight to the British Museum.

Whilst the correction of this error is good news, not least for the vehicles transporting the 7 million British Library books for the Google digitisation project, the confusion between Library and Museum persists:

Image © 2011 Google © 2011 Tele Atlas

The confusion is understandable: both the British Library and British Museum are vast repositories of stuff, much of it historical and very special. Both have ‘British’ in their name. The two were in fact one and the same institution until 1972, and only became physically separate when the British Library moved a mile up the road to St. Pancras in 1998. 

Confusing the Museum and the Library is an error not exclusive to Google, but politicians, prominent TV historians, visitors, even writers of things known as letters. The BM has now stopped forwarding on the BL‘s mail addressed to them by mistake, presumably with the loss of many hundreds of jobs.

Clearly, Google’s mistake is not the sort of co-ordinate error which places a fast food outlet in the middle of Tower Bridge (and for more on such errors see this blog post). The mistake reflects a popular assumption. Maybe it is entirely appropriate that the map should lead one to the wrong place. The map reflects reality. At least, that’ll be my excuse when I’m late for work tomorrow, having followed it to the wrong/right place.

TH