[Historic] welcome Historic OpenStreetMap, introductions

Thu Aug 30 19:27:51 BST 2012

My name is Sean Gillies. I'm a programmer at NYU's Institute for the
Study of the Ancient World where I do a bunch of geography and
web-related things for classicists and historians. One of these is a
gazetteer/dictionary of places from the Greek and Roman worlds called
"Pleiades" (http://pleiades.stoa.org). People use Pleiades to tag
texts (http://gap.alexandriaarchive.org/gapvis/index.html#index) and
cultural objects (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pleiades:*=*).

I've been a very minor OSM contributor since 2009
(http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/sgillies). Recently, I've begun to
advocate for using OSM as a reference for the locations of existing
ancient monuments like the following in Roman Nemausus (now Nîmes):

http://pleiades.stoa.org/search?Cites=osm:*
http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/148142

If you know Nîmes, you know there are a few monuments I haven't
addressed yet. I'd love to see more features of the old city – it's
walls, gates, streets, the forum – in a historical OSM. Every month or
so an archaeologist asks me if Pleiades is the right place to upload
his or her site maps. I don't think it is, I think a historical OSM
would be the better place for street and building level data.

I've met a bunch of you in other contexts and look forward to more
discussion here.

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:38 AM, Mikel Maron <mikel_maron at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Jeff
>
> Lots of good prior-art to dig through. A few more I'd throw in are Stamen's
> Trulia Hindsight http://stamen.com/clients/trulia (among the most astounding
> things I've seen on the internet ever, unfortunately down right now). One of
> my own old attempts at working with timely map data
> http://worldkit.org/wmstimenav/. And for an idea why OSM and time data don't
> work out that great, back again to Stamen with Burning Map from yesterday
> http://maps.stamen.com/burningmap/#15/40.7763/-119.2074
>
> Frankie Roberto pretty much nailed it 3 years, how OSM and history don't and
> could possibly interact. Slides are worth perusing for sure.
> http://www.slideshare.net/frankieroberto/mapp-history-on-open-street-map
>
> We've already jumped to 16 members on this discussion list. Who are all of
> you?
>
> Mikel
>
> * Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron
>
> ________________________________
> From: Jeff Meyer <jeff at gwhat.org>
> To: "historic at openstreetmap.org" <historic at openstreetmap.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2012 1:39 PM
> Subject: Re: [Historic] welcome Historic OpenStreetMap, introductions
>
> Hi Mikel -
>
> Thanks for putting this together!
>
> I'm Jeff. <chorus>Hi, Jeff!</chorus> - my primary interest in improving the
> quality and availability of digital map resources for improving history and
> geography education in schools. I'm based in Seattle and am working (when
> I'm not working to support this habit) on a variety of history &
> mapping-related projects.
>
> OSM's infrastructure seems like a great foundation for building a historic
> mapping reference base for all the points you've mentioned. I'm not sure of
> a need to make OSM more history-aware, but that's a wholly separate
> discussion topic. What about a meeting at OSM/SOTMNA in Portland?
>
> Per your request, here are some other historic mapping efforts that I think
> should be included in any discussion of this sort:
> General-purpose / platform history mapping tools:
> - MapStory - www.mapstory.com - OpenLayers-based historic mapping
> infrastructure
>
> Some sites that could use Historic OSM-type data (or vice versa):
> - Big History - www.bighistoryproject.com
> - LookBackMaps - www.lookbackmaps.net (part of HistoryPin -
> www.historypin.com)
> - Pastmapper - www.pastmapper.com
> - Pleiades - pleiades.stoa.org
> - Old Oakland - www.teczno.com/old-oakland
> - OldSF - oldsf.org
> - OmnesViae: Roman Route Planner - www.omnesviae.org
> - ORBIS: Roman World Geospatial - orbis.stanford.edu
> - Ushahidi - ushahidi.com
> - visualeyes - www.viseyes.org
> - Visualizing Emancipation - dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation
>
> There's also a digital storytelling effort out of UVa, the name is escaping
> me.
>
> Jeff Meyer
> Global World History Atlas
> www.gwhat.org
>
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 9:08 AM, Mikel Maron <mikel_maron at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> A long time coming (though not at all approaching the time ranges we'll be
> dealing with) here's the OSM Historic list.
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/historic
>
> I wrote up this description for what this list is about. It's not the finest
> crafted bit of text in the world, and you may even disagree with it, but
> here's my best conception of what we're about here. We can refine.
>
> This may now be the moment for OpenHistoricalMap. There's a critical mass of
> interest in exploring open collaboration of historic geodata.
>
> It makes a good deal of sense to approach this from the experience of
> OpenStreetMap. An open database and API, & free tagging with community
> discussion is a proven model for collaboration among a diverse set of uses.
> The software ecosystem offers much to build off: the API, renderer, editors,
> gazateer...
>
> Question for anyone who's looked at this closely is how tightly linked into
> OSM.org should this be. As is, you can easily specify time delimited tags
> (start_date=*, end_date=*), but the OSM tool chain does not have in-built
> awareness for them. For an example of the problem, here's the situation for
> multiple years of Burning Man (http://osm.org/go/Tc4Ki1bp-). Should OSM.org
> itself become time-aware, or rather, should OSM.org continue to represent
> only the "present moment"? No matter the answer, there's one good and
> feasible approach here to the broader question, and in any case, OHM will
> benefit.
>
>
> There's a lot to talk about, and there's a lot to experiment with. First,
> let's convene. A few of us have already joined the list. Feel free to extend
> the invite to other folks interested in this topic. And please do _introduce
> yourself_ and how you're interested in historic mapping.
>
> As for doing, I had in mind...
>
> * Build a few solid example target use cases for OHM. A historic NYC
> gazateer. Mapping before and after effect of new oil industry infrastructure
> in Tanzania. Visualize Burning Man over the years.
> * Set up software infrastructure to experiment, including custom, time
> sensitive render, filters for editing in JOSM, etc.
> * Hash things out and do brilliant stuff.
>
> Also curious to hear about other projects out there that overlap, and what
> kind of data is out there.
>
> Welcome!
>
> Mikel
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Historic at openstreetmap.org
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>
>
>
>
> --
> Jeff Meyer
> Global World History Atlas
> www.gwhat.org
> jeff at gwhat.org
> 206-676-2347
>
>
>
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>
>
>
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>

-- 
Sean Gillies