The process of georectifying a map really changed my understanding of the difference between creating a map designed for accuracy, and creating one for other purposes. By analyzing a map made as part of a poster for air mail, it was clear that this map didn’t accurately represent the location of cities in the real world. But after thinking about this, I realized that this wasn’t a problem. The map was created to show cities which air mail could be sent to and from, and it did this well.
Unfortunately, I think this connects to a larger flaw with georeferencing, which is that it can fail to fully show the intent of the map. By plotting these points, I feel like it became easy to see the map as poorly designed in some sense, when it was actually very good at its purpose. Georectifying is certainly valuable for certain maps, especially historical ones, where it could help find places that we no longer know the location of. However, for some maps, georectifying may be a fun exercise, but doesn’t fully connect to the purpose of the map, and is just attempting to fit it into a category that it doesn’t meet.
In the end, georectifying was interesting, but I think that it could potentially be overused. I’m sure part of this was the method with which I was doing it. I was doing this as part of a project to digitize the David Rumsey Map Collection, and I’m sure the organizers of this initiative didn’t have the time or resources to sort through everything in this collection and find what would and wouldn’t be able and valuable to georectify. I also think the limitations of 2D mapping play a part in this. One of the maps I saw through this was a map of travel routes to London, with London at the center of a circular map of the earth. This was inherently difficult to connect to a real map, given that the Earth isn’t a flat circle, and most modern maps are rectangular to best represent this.
