This week we took a plunge into completely new waters for me. In some sense, I’ve used mapping technologies before, but only from a user’s perspective. I’ve never actually thought deeply about the history of mapping technology and more technical aspects like the innovative nature of the Google Maps ’tile’. Certainly, I had never heard about georeferencing either.
Because of my lack of understanding of spatial technologies, I oftentimes just attribute spatial humanities projects to some black-box implementation that only the utmost experts in the field had the know-how for. But I’ve come to learn that because of the labor of many before us, mapping has become more accessible to common people like me. One prime example is the crowdsourced effort that has gone into georeferencing the images on David Rumsey Georeferencer. Here is a link to my own georeferenced map. Through georeferencing an image myself on their website, I got a better understanding of the requirements of a spatial humanities project. I also got to see how easy it was to integrate a georeferenced map into any project by using one of the various formats that the site allows-WMTS, TileJSON, XYZ link, and GeoTiff.
With what we learned on Thursday with ArcGIS online, the possibilities seem vast with what can be done with a georeferenced map. With only the preliminary knowledge I have of mapping technologies, I was able to figure out how to integrate various datasets with georeferenced maps to raise interesting research questions that relate back to space and place. I will say, however, that this process wasn’t entirely seamless. Even despite their good intentions with the various export formats they provided, integrating a georeferenced map into ArcGIS online was sometimes unsuccessful for reasons I wasn’t entirely sure of. From what I understood, it may related to API keys or something of the like.
While impressive and useful in some fields, there are many research questions better left unexplored with georeferencing and mapping technologies in general. Because mapping is inherently tied to spatial data, research questions without ties to space would not benefit much from it. While not positive, I have a feeling that maybe areas of literature research just wouldn’t benefit from mapping technology at all. With that said, I’m excited to be proven wrong to see how such technology could be used in literature research.
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I agree with the idea that mapping technology felt like a black-box element before this class. It was surprisingly easy with the software we used, which I found interesting. I think that a lot of this class is demystifying black-box technology.