Update about the Map Comparison Tool from the Visualising Urban Geography Project

A few days ago, I blogged about the new map comparison tool from the Visualising Urban Geography project and lamented the lack of provision for maps outside Edinburgh.

Chris Fleet, Senior Map Curator at the National Library of Scotland has kindly pointed out that if I pan to the area of the country in which I'm interested, if there are geo-referenced maps available for that area, they will appear in the list and can be selected.

I've tried this out, and it works. However, I've also discovered that the map availability doesn't appear until you've zoomed in to an appropriate level.

So, for example, starting from the initial view of the dual map tool, I zoom out 4 times to pan quickly to Jedburgh, and zoom in 4 times, the Jedburgh town plan of 1858 appears in the list and can be selected. Note that if the area of your view is outside the area on a specific map, that map won't appear in the list. So if know a map should be available (see the list of geo-referenced maps in the Map Library) but doesn't appear in the list, try panning around and zooming in or out.

Of course, as I mentioned before, there aren't many geo-referenced maps for the Borders, however the view below shows the expansion of Kirkcaldy, Fife.

New Map Comparison Tool from the Visualising Urban Geography Project

There's a new tool from the Visualising Urban Geography project that allows you to compare two different maps of Edinburgh side by side on the screen.

We've always had the capability to do this manually using two paper maps but it's very laborious and not very easy to compare like with like.

This new tool uses geo-referenced maps which are overlaid on top of the current street map, and you can decide which maps to compare.

For family historians, this has several great benefits; you can see, at a glance:

• how streets have developed since the previous map
• where new buildings are
• where streets have disappeared
• which streets have been renamed

and that will make it easier than ever to look at census records, view the route taken by the census enumerator, and go directly to the site of an ancestor's dwelling, and if you're lucky the actual dwelling itself.

Also, I think it will be helpful when looking at valuation rolls to see what a street looked like before or after.

The picture shows an area of Spring Gardens, Edinburgh. Notice how a bit of land to the right of St Ann's Bank House in the top map (1849) has become a row of buildings, Violet Bank, in the bottom map (1876).

Have a go at using the dual map tool, yourself, and let me know what you think.

If you want to change map when you're in the tool, click the [clear overlay] link to remove the map, then click the new map you want.

Of course, the great drawback for us is that it allows only the comparison of Edinburgh maps, however, as it has been done for Edinburgh, it presumably can be done for other places, too; and that's another great reason to get on with the geo-referencing of historical maps.

Visualising Urban Geography Launch Event

Last Thursday (23 February) I attended the launch event of the 'Visualising Urban Geography' project at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. About 80 other people attended. There was an introduction to the project at the Addressing History launch event in November, and I reported on the December Visualising Urban Geography workshop that provided a chance to try out one of the tools, ExtMap (now Map Builder), that the project had developed using sample data produced by the project.

In last week’s event, Professor Richard Rodger discussed the objectives of the project:

• to create geo-referenced maps of Edinburgh
• to develop software that could be used for free
• to reach a broader public
• to develop dynamic maps so as to further knowledge in the 19th and 20th centuries

He gave interesting examples in the ways, the tools developed have been used; we saw the development of Edinburgh over time, easy ways to calculate the area size and the length of the perimeter of irregularly shaped plots of land. He suggested other sets of data that might be used with these tools:

• landowners and property holdings
• shareholders
• store and credit card holders
• utility bills
• census information

The new tools, ExtMap and MapBuilder, use a Google interface for viewing maps and the open source Thematic Mapping Engine.

Chris Fleet discussed the mapping results of the project including a demonstration of geo-referencing and suggested this would be a good tool to use for mapping burial grounds.

Professor Bob Morris talked about the massive impact this project will have on historical analysis. He said that images, graphs and maps are more important in
writing about history than ever before. He used examples to compare the ration of women to men in Edinburgh's 19th century population.

Lastly, Dr Gittings, a geographer at the University of Edinburgh, pointed out how this project has brought history and geography closer than ever before.

Borders Family History Society has been closely involved with the project since the December workshop, and our goal of representing poor relief recipients in Melrose and Jedburgh representation on dynamic maps was mentioned as one of the case studies. For me, there’s been a steep learning curve in using the new tools, ExtMap and MapBuilder, to produce these maps, however, we’re very grateful for the support we’ve had from Stuart Nicol in using these tools and from Professor Rodger in analysing the results.

In our research into poor relief, we transcribed the core information exactly as it’s written, but that was not the end of the process for creating these maps. In the case of Jedburgh, the Poor Law Inspector did not record the town name of Jedburgh, so I had to add that for Jedburgh addresses. For Melrose, the inspector abbreviated many road names (often in different ways) and they needed to be manually expanded. Any addresses that are unrecognised get assigned to 0 degrees latitude and longitude, which is in the ocean to the west of southern Africa, so such addresses need to be removed or substituted with the modern address and that has been a lot more work. We have so much data that the tool is quite slow at creating the map co-ordinates, and I found that for each set of data there’s a re-iterative process – run the tool, check the results, resolve the problems and repeat until there are no more errors. The tool uses a vast database created by Google of addresses, and that imposes limitations, as their database is not completely accurate.

Residential Addresses of Poor Law Recipients in Jedburgh and Melrose

Have a look at our initial attempt at mapping the residential addresses of poor relief recipients. The image is a snapshot, click the link to see the full interactive map. There's still a bit of work to be done on this map.
Each pin represents one or more recipients - we can't yet show the number of recipients represented, however clicking on a pin shows the information about one of the recipients.
Click on the ticks on the layers to the left of the map to select or deselect specific layers corresponding to our different publications.

The main drawbacks are:

• There are still some recipients positioned off the coast of Africa
• Only recipients in and around Jedburgh from our Jedburgh publications have been included
• The pink pins represent Melrose 1871 to 1874, the blue pins representing the other publications
• Each pin represents one or more recipients - we can't yet show the number of recipients represented

We hope you find this map as interesting as we do.
These are early days in the use of this tool, and we expect to be able to use it more effectively in the future.

We would like to have your feedback (using the comments link below), especially any suggestions you have for further improvements and suggestions of other data sets that you would like to see mapped.

Updated Visualising Urban Geography Workshop

You may remember that I went to an interesting Visualising Urban Geography workshop on 6th December 2010 to explore their new web-based resources. They're running an updated free workshop at 2.00 to 4.30 pm on Thursday 24 February at the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge,
Edinburgh, EH1 1EW (see map), so expect to see a variety of maps and photos of Edinburgh; information on using and creating geo-referenced maps, the Visualising Urban Geography project bringing together sets of historical geo-referenced maps, social and demographic information to analyse and present data, and to get experience of using one of their tools, ExtMap (now Map Builder), to plot a set of trades-people on a map of Edinburgh. I've successfully used this tool to plot recipients of poor law relief on a historical map of Jedburgh. I recommend the workshop, though I hope the weather will be better this time, and you can phone 0131 623 3918 to book your place or book online.

Visualising Urban Geography Workshop at National Library of Scotland

Poor Relief Recipients (with identifiable Edinburgh addresses) from Jedburgh and Melrose parishes Poor Law Records volumes 1852-1930

At the AddressingHistory Launch Event, Professor Richard Rodger mentioned a workshop on 6th December at the Maps Reading Room, National Library of Scotland, to explore their new web-based resources, based on the work they've done for Edinburgh; and in spite of the snowy conditions, I attended this. Although they advertised the workshop for a general audience, it contained a lot of discussion about the technologies involved in the website, as well as a hands-on opportunity to show a set of data on a map.

Chris Fleet began by showing us a variety of maps, prospect views, plans, aerial photos, and digital maps of Edinburgh, all part of the 20,000 items digitised over the last 15 years. Key to this is their collection of geo-referenced maps, maps that can be perfectly positioned in relation to another map by using lots of co-ordinates, and it’s these maps that allow data about locations of people and objects to be combined with maps. Chris demonstrated how new geo-referenced maps could be produced using free technology and said he would be delighted to hear from anyone interested in volunteering to produce new maps.

Professor Richard Rodger then demonstrated the Visualising Urban Geography project with some exciting tools bringing together sets of historical geo-referenced maps, social and demographic information to analyse and present data in more detail than at the AddressingHistory launch in November. He showed Edinburgh as a collection of registration districts, the growth of Edinburgh since medieval times, as a comparison of sanitary districts and property rents, as a comparison of advocates and solicitors homes over time, the occupations of Edinburgh’s colony residents and discussed the historical reasons for the changes we saw on the maps.
He showed too, how they could accurately measure distances and areas of land, which could be useful to a lot of professions.

Stuart Nicol discussed the technologies involved which was rather complicated, and I think most of us were glad that this was followed by a coffee break.

After the break we had a go at using one of their tools, ExtMap (now Map Builder), to plot a set of trades-people on a map of Edinburgh, using spreadsheet sets of data that Professor Rodger’s team had extracted from a 1911 post office directory. There were coal merchants, cycle repairers, dairymen, egg-producers, and many other trades. Using their instructions, I managed to plot the egg- producers, who surprisingly were concentrated in northeast Edinburgh and on the road to Leith. Professor Rodger explained that often it’s difficult to guess, when looking at a mass of data, what plotting locations on a map will show, but the resulting map often presents new insights.

Since the workshop I’ve used the data from our publications of Poor Law Records for Melrose and Jedburgh to plot recipients of poor relief (see the yellow circles), who lived in Edinburgh, and that's in the picture. I'd like to be able to show this as an interactive web page, and a future intention is to show recipients in Jedburgh on a map, and those recipients that lived in the bit of Galashiels that was in Melrose parish on a map of Galashiels.

AddressingHistory Launch Event, Edinburgh - 17th November

I attended this event today at the National Library of Scotland. There were 30-40 other people there, some professional genealogists, some staff, some from heritage organisations interested in using data, some from family history organisations, some social historians, and other individuals.

For me it was an exciting and interesting afternoon and gave me lots of ideas for ways that we might be able to analyse poor law data, wages, allowances paid, and the 19th century police and criminal records data being researched.

I hadn't realised that the National Library of Scotland has been digitising documents for over 10 years, and Cate Newton (Director of Collections and Research) mentioned some digitised collections that I think it would be interesting to explore further.

Professor Robert Morris introduced the AddressingHistory project and made the point that the website although launched today is very much a beta site - there is a lot of work to be done in cleaning and correcting data, and conducting testing. He pointed out that the Post Office directories have varied data structures, however that's not fully reflected in the website data. He estimated that a lot of the directory entries have not been converted into the correct text, which is a very common problem when using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and is a reason why searches may fail. Result listings are generated from a Google search of the address field, which may contain both a business address and a private address, or have some other aspect to it containing the search term.

Stuart Macdonald (AddressingHistory Project Manager, EDINA) told us about the management of the projects and that registered users of the site will have the opportunity to do crowd-sourcing.

Nicola Osborne (AddressingHistory Project Officer & Social Media Officer, EDINA) showed some guest blogs with ideas, and she wants suggestions for content and invites guest blogs. She asked us to tweet to #AHLaunch, and link to their Facebook page.

Professor Richard Rodger demonstrated the Visualising Urban Geography project with some exciting tools to analyse and present data.

Dr Helen Chisholm (EDINA) talked about the Statistical Accounts of Scotland – there are 28,000 digitised pages. There's both a free version (photos of the pages) and a paid for version whereby you can search for and download text. She invited us to put our favourite bits on their Facebook page.

Chris Fleet (Senior Map Curator, NLS) talked about Digitised Historic Mapping – and all the different ways that that data could be used.

Kenny Beaton (School Of Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh) informed us about a newish website to be launched in December, which contains 50,000 audio tracks of prose, verse, and song, some in Gaelic and some in Scots.
The site is called both Tobar An Dualchais and Kist O' Riches.

Ines Mayfarth talked about the Internet Archive digitisation project to digitise Post Office directories; originally entirely separate from AddressingHistory. In contrast to my previous blog on AddressingHistory, 750 (not 400) Post Office directories have been digitised between the 1770s and 1911. The first 3 letters of surnames in the directories are in the process of being indexed and that is likely to be available in Autumn 2011.
Ines reminded us that the Post Office directories also contained other interesting information, timetables, ferry schedules, ads, as well as lots of other information.

Peter Burnhill (Director, EDINA) summarised the afternoon and we adjourned for drinks, nibbles and networking.

The whole proceedings were being videoed and presumably those videos will be online soon.