Comments on: Georeferencing History

By: diy power

diy power — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 05:01:48 +0000

This is good thing for the youngsters in learning the past. Majority of us would be dreadfully bored to be trapped and stay for an hour or so in any history class. But with the innovative intervention of technology, any student may no longer have to drag him or herself in to the class. They can now be visually reinforced in order to have a better understanding.

By: S. Zayas

S. Zayas — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 08:40:44 +0000

Great idea. That would be a great help to students. And also it would make teaching easier with the use of this latest in technology. Nice article you wrote. Keep it up.

S. Zayas
Author

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:29:29 +0000

That looks interesting, especially the DjVu. Jim Humble

By: Greg

Greg — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 20:48:23 +0000

I checked out rails and trails that is a very interesting historical look at the railways from the past. Thanks for the information.

By: Ted Jensen

Ted Jensen — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 07:10:11 +0000

“You will need to install the free DjVu browser plug-in and the Google Earth application. These will allow you to quickly view and navigate these resources full screen at high resolution.”

With those in place, it’s a really nice user experience.

By: Rich Wisneski

Rich Wisneski — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:05:39 +0000

Similar to Lewis, I, too, am doing text encoding to manuscript and typeface material concerning Cleveland and Western Reserve history. I would like to learn more about georeferencing to link place names from these texts to historical maps

By: Lewis Ulman

Lewis Ulman — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:50:18 +0000

Looking forward to hearing more, Stephen. I regularly teach courses in electronic textual editing, using previously unpublished nineteenth-century American manuscripts in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at The Ohio State University. The last two projects involve journals of extended ocean voyages, and I am exploring ways to georeference and visually present these voyages.

By: Stephen Titchenal

Stephen Titchenal — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:03:49 +0000

Eric, I am always looking at other options for sharing of high resolution materials. So far I have not been happy with the speed of refresh of adobe acrobat for large images — even on a fast computer. DjVu is so fast at redrawing the screen even on older computers, that I have felt it was worth the extra hastle of having to install it. It also allows you to very easily select and copy a section of an image at any resolution for reuse in presentations. It does mean that the files are not accessible to people on public computers that do not allow djvu to be installed. (It also better than MrSID viewers in my experience) I have found IT departments in schools are willing to install it, if you explain why you need it. I provide pdf or jpg files of some images for those that can’t get it installed.

I have been experimenting with the tiling of large georeferenced images so that only the sections being viewed need to be downloaded. Again Google Earth allows the most options for display of layers, but it is not often installed on public computers. I have not taken the time to learn a lot about the mashup options for Google Maps and Bing, but my initial experience has been that they are more complicated and not as full featured. I look forward to hearing others experiences.

My philosphy is to always maintain the original tiff scans, so that I can always reformat any images for newer technology.

By: Erin Bell

Erin Bell — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:42:16 +0000

Hi Stephen, sounds like an interesting session. We have a handful of GIS/GeoReferencing/Mapping people coming to THATCamp (as well as others who will be interested to learn more), so I’m sure you’ll find some folks to share ideas and maybe work together on a session.

I recently read somewhere about the DjVu plug-in and it’s marketing/branding strategy. The message was that they do not really have one, which ultimately hurts sites that use DjVu. Unlike, say, Adobe Acrobat or Flash, you cannot count on users having it installed (this is also true for Adobe plug-ins, though to a lesser extent I imagine). Have you had this problem at all with Rails & Trails? Or do you see any barriers to using Google Earth as a vehicle for GeoReferenced maps? Are you aware of any web/browser standards (current or in development) that apply to this kind of work? Does openstreetmap.org have any use here or is Google/Yahoo/MS really that much more developed? I tend to embrace open source alternatives whenever I can, but with mapping, I’m not that knowledgeable, so I’m not sure what’s out there. In any case, I find your site to be extremely useful and know that faculty/staff here at CSU often recommend it to students for research, so I’ll be curious to hear more.