Crossing the Atlantic

This chapter explores the existence of exotica in America. The flora and fauna of the Americas offered fresh scope for demonstrating the centrality of European culture. New species had to be ordered, classified, named, and fitted within established parameters. From the start, the same was true for native peoples. Furthermore, pictorial and textual descriptions were used to advance several agendas with far-reaching consequences. Primarily to encourage settlement in the New World, exotica were portrayed as variations on European plants and animals. Early maps of North America thus featured deer, bears, beavers, and rabbits, with only the occasional wild turkey—unique to the New World—intruding upon the familiar bestiary. Throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, European colonizing and commercial interests continued to purvey a vision of American resources as easy to transform into marketable commodities.

A Practical Procedure to Integrate the First 1:500 Urban Map of Valencia into a Tile-Based Geospatial Information System

The use of geographic data from early maps is a common approach to understanding urban geography as well as to study the evolution of cities over time. The specific goal of this paper is to provide a means for the integration of the first 1:500 urban map of the city of València (Spain) on a tile-based geospatial system. We developed a workflow consisting of three stages: the digitization of the original 421 map sheets, the transformation to the European Terrestrial Reference System of 1989 (ETRS89), and the conversion to a tile-based file format, where the second stage is clearly the most mathematically involved. The second stage actually consists of two steps, one transformation from the pixel reference system to the 1929 local reference system followed by a second transformation from the 1929 local to the ETRS89 system. The last stage comprises a map reprojection to adapt to tile-based geospatial standards. The paper describes a pilot study of one map sheet and results showed that the affine and bilinear transformations performed well in both transformations with average residuals under 6 and 3 cm respectively. The online viewer developed in this study shows that the derived tile-based map conforms to common standards and lines up well with other raster and vector datasets.

From village to city through maps: historical cartographic materials as an information source on 20th century environmental changes due to urbanisation in Poland

The article presents the use of historical Polish post-war topographic maps and their usefulness in the detection and assessment of environmental changes caused by 20th century urbanisation. The case study area is the Polish city of Lublin. Two main research questions are defined and answered. The first is what kinds of maps can be used to trace environmental changes as well as to find the present-day remains of past environments and what is the reliability of these maps? Several series of topographic maps are used here together with aerial photography. The second research question is what changes can be found by comparing spatial sources and what features can be found today with the help of early maps. The main features investigated in this section are linear (road networks) and areal (orchards) supplemented with point features of various kinds (trees, wells, shrines). The quality of cartographic information is assessed and remnants of the past environment are discovered.

Large geospatial images discovery: metadata model and technological framework

The advancements in geospatial web technology triggered efforts for disclosure of valuable resources of historical collections. This paper focuses on the role of spatial data infrastructures (SDI) in such efforts. The work describes the interplay between SDI technologies and potential use cases in libraries such as cartographic heritage. The metadata model is introduced to link up the sources from these two distinct fields. To enhance the data search capabilities, the work focuses on the representation of the content-based metadata of raster images, which is the crucial prerequisite to target the search in a more effective way. The architecture of the prototype system for automatic raster data processing, storage, analysis and distribution is introduced. The architecture responds to the characteristics of input datasets, namely to the continuous flow of very large raster data and related metadata. Proposed solutions are illustrated on the case study of cartometric analysis of digitised early maps and related metadata encoding.