Search the text in historical maps

The David Rumsey Map Collection has been home to tens of thousands of historical maps, and now you can search the collection by the text in the maps instead of just through metadata:

About 57,000 of the georeferenced maps from the collection have been processed with a machine learning tool called mapKurator to collect all the text on maps, i.e. every piece of text (printed or handwritten) that appears on a map, including place names, but also information like a map’s title or its scale, or the names of the people involved in producing the map. Through this process of automatic annotation, this approach turns the text on maps into structured data (text on maps data): the enormous amount of data that has been collected from these maps is now searchable.

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David Rumsey Map Center, cataloging historical works

The David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford houses hundreds of thousands of maps dating back to the 1500s. Andres Picon for San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the collection:

At the heart of that endeavor is the digitization of Rumsey’s vast physical collection, a project he began in the late 1990s when he launched davidrumsey.com, a constantly growing aggregation of about 112,000 digitized historical maps from his personal inventory. Rumsey, 77, is in the process of donating his entire map collection — more than 200,000 physical maps plus the digital ones — to Stanford so that they can be cataloged for the enjoyment of generations to come.

“It’s not only a database; it allows people to get lost inside it, no pun intended,” he said. “If you make it really usable and accessible the way ours is, it just becomes something different.”

For preservation, I wish we saw more of this and less blockchain. Hundreds of years from now, how much visualization work is still viewable?

You can view a large portion of the Rumsey collection here. You can also browse the data visualization tag to see some of the earliest made charts.

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Exhibition of historical visualization

RJ Andrews, in collaboration with the David Rumsey Map Center, curated a collection of historical data visualization:

Data visualization leapt from its Enlightenment origins and into the minds of the general public in the 1760s. It cast more powerful spells throughout the following century. By 1900, modern science, technology, and social movements had all benefited from this new quantitative art. Its inventions include the timeline, bar chart, and thematic map. Together, these innovations changed how we understand the world and our place within it. Data visualization helped a new imagination emerge, wired to navigate a reality much bigger than any single person’s lived experience.

Bookmarking this for a closer look later.

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Rumsey Collection with a data visualization subject tag

The David Rumsey Map Collection, known for its many browsable historical maps, now has a “data visualization” subject tag. This means you can now quickly access over 1,000 charts that date back centuries. I’m not sure how long the browser has had the filter available, but I’m glad it does. [via @srendgen]

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Old Maps, Ingenuity, and the Internet

Plate CXXVIII. Roseburg Quadrangle, Oregon, Land Classification and Density of Standing Timber (Cartography Associates CC BY-NC-SA)

Plate CXXVIII. Roseburg Quadrangle, Oregon, Land Classification and Density of Standing Timber (Cartography Associates CC BY-NC-SA)

I love old maps. Many are wildly inaccurate. Many are fanciful. Many are surprisingly well done. In our era of Google Maps and GPS, it is easy to forget that early mapmakers could not easily see what they were drawing from above. The combination of skills, tricks, rules-of-thumb, and artistry that goes into cartography bends the mind.

David Rumsey has collected maps for decades and decided to donate his map collection to the Internet. Now, the internet has one more thing with which it can distract me.

*Hat tip to Rebecca Rosen.