[OHM] Historic Digest, Vol 22, Issue 19

[Karl Grossner]

Thanks Rob and Tim,

Seems like exciting times for projects with tag lines like "creating the world's most universal, detailed, and out of date map" and "creating a world map with a time slide." When I tweeted these out today, many retweets in my circles. You're probably aware there have been a few stabs at a 'world historical GIS' and geographic data repositories in academic circles (e.g. ECAI). The issue of resources has always stalled progress. It's a very different picture in the last couple years due in large part to linked open data and web-based tools for warping and tracing. 

There are two groups in academia intensely interested in all this, and more that will be once they understand what's feasible and on the horizon. One is the geospatial and geosemantics data modeler types like me, the other is people with historical research questions and indexing needs -- historians, literary scholars in the first case, and museum/cultural heritage/library folks in the second.

I have a foot in most of these worlds (guess that makes me a mutant?) and very interested to open channels of communication. Also to build stuff. There's layers and layers here -- raw data, then spatial models, research results, and educational/fun stuff built atop it (e.g. http://orbis.stanford.edu/v2). I know Susanna is aware, but I'll mention for others a SIG I recently co-founded called GeoHumanities (http://geohumanities.org) -- it's early days and we're just sorting out what our activities will be beyond a clearinghouse of best practice information, tools and resources.

I won't be quite so long-winded in the future; not sure if I can make the hangout but will try.

best, Karl


----- Original Message -----
> Karl,
> 
> great to hear from you. The OSM stack already has the historic:civilization,
> historic:period, historic:era and start/end date tags to mark up the time of
> structures.
> 
> I'm keen on using something like TIME-OWL [1] to handle both cases (era vs.
> date) in a linked geo data version of OHM. I need to play with that later on
> again. Ideally, I'd like the content negotiation to output json on request.
> 
> I think you're mixing up Digitizing with Binarizing. It takes a lot of effort
> to scan a map one at a time, but transforming an image into a digital map is
> something that scales well once the software stack is setup. And as Tim
> mentions later on, the specs change over time and many problems remain open,
> such as precision and accuracy.
> 
> -rhw
> 
> > From: Karl Grossner <karlg at stanford.edu>
> > Subject: Re: [OHM] : TimeSlider - calling attention to early prototype
> > 
> > Hello all,
> > 
> > I've just now become aware of the OHM effort (hi Susanna) and very
> > interested to learn what the development goals are. Is there a link to
> > some material laying them out? For example, is the plan to provide the
> > means for loading copyright-free scans of historic maps and an editor for
> > digitizing their contents?
> > 
> > My interests in this include both the spatial and temporal, and the joining
> > of those two. A couple of things that might interest: I've done some work
> > with colleague Elijah Meeks on representing historical time (
> > http://dh.stanford.edu/topotime ), and there is a discussion under way
> > right now in GeoJSON world about adding a "when" object to the forthcoming
> > GeoJSON-LD standard (several threads, listed here:
> > https://github.com/geojson/geojson-ld/issues ).
> > 
> > I'm very interested in the prospects for developing over time a global
> > historical atlas that includes vector roads and rivers along with cities
> > and boundaries. There are a few schemes aiming at such a thing, therefore
> > many people talking about similar issues but in different conversations.
> > One thing about digitizing is its so time-consuming, getting the "right"
> > encoding scheme down beforehand becomes really important. Not sure how,
> > but merging the discussions somehow makes sense.
> > 
> > best
> > Karl
> > 
> > --------------
> > Karl Grossner
> > Digital Humanities Research Developer
> > Stanford University Libraries
> > Stanford,CA US
> > www.kgeographer.org
> 
> 
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