From the Visualising Urban Geographies Project Web Site:
The new online resources [set to debut next week] were created by the Visualising Urban Geographies project. This collaborative project between the University of Edinburgh and National Library of Scotland has brought together sets of historical maps, census and address-based information to allow new ways of understanding Edinburgh’s history.
The central aim is to bring together historical data provided by Professor Richard Rodger with historical maps provided by the National Library of Scotland. This partnership will create an online resource allowing new insights into the spatial character and historical development of Edinburgh. The objective is also to enable others – students, academics and the public – to use new open source tools for related web-applications to reveal the spatial characteristics of their own cities
The project team (Richard Rodger, Chris Fleet and Stuart Nicol) is a partnership between the University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland. The team will re-use existing research data obtained originally from the census, property registers, occupational and business addresses in directories on Edinburgh relating to the period c.1820-1940. this will be used to develop and test a methodology intended to side-step the need for historians and occasional users to learn Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
By these means spatial data on Edinburgh will be interrogated in innovative ways, exploiting the potential of the recent intensive scanning and geo-referencing programme in the NLS map library. A key outcome will be to demonstrate how new and existing research on other towns, cities and villages can be linked to a rapidly expanding corpus of freely-available geo-referenced mapping and imagery.
The end result will enable students, academic researchers in most humanities disciplines, local historians and the public to learn how to input their own data and, through the tools developed by the project, generate maps of their own superimposed on any nationally or locally held, geo-referenced map
The launch is scheduled to take place on Thursday, February 24th.
About Gary Price
