[OHM] 3 Students Working for a Semester on Historical Map Project

[SK53]

Hi All,

This is a personal response. I'd love to see this in OHM.

I think one of the important points we want to make that as an open
platform OHM removes quite a number of problems with
support/longevity/sharing which many of the more successful digital
humanities projects tend to run into.

The timeslider is certainly our most pressing UI component which is
missing. Some work has been done on it, but this might be best regarded as
prototyping of the functionality. Probably Rob Warren is the first point of
call to discuss this (but he can be busy).

We have recently been discussing the renderer (see recent emails in this
channel). There is some potential for a client-side render (e.g., using
Kothic) which would avoid some of the issues with static tile rendering.
Just general tweaking of the default Carto style to make it less focussed
on modern road layouts and addition of things which have a longer
historical context is also something which may be worth doing. I have some
ideas on my own to do list (basically motorway/trunk/primary can be
rendered similarly, and we probably could do with a more muted colour
scheme).

A particularly interesting point with renderers is how to handle
coastlines. The OSM approach has a number of flaws, many of which are made
more apparent on OHM. I presume that Venice has plenty of changes in
coastlines. I have started experimenting with tags for this in Buenos Aires
(the shoreline was extended by new docks and land reclamation several times
in the late 19th century), but not with how to handle this in renderers.

Regards,

Jerry Clough

On 2 March 2015 at 14:38, Dennis Meier <dennis.meier at epfl.ch> wrote:

>  (Disclaimer: This is a resubmit. The last Mail wasn't accepted by the
> list since I wasn't subscribed)
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> We are 3 students from EPFL (http://epfl.ch/) IT Master Programs. We are
> working this semester on a Digital Humanities Project about the evolution
> of frontiers in the Venice republic. Our predecessor built this nice little
> webapp:
>
> http://veniceatlas.epfl.ch/atlas/timelines/dominio-da-mar/ (you can
> scroll to the bottom of the page to get to the actual map)
>
> Our task would be to improve on this and maybe build something more
> general. For this, we would like to prevent to reinvent the wheel and
> thought about spending our time working on openhistoricalmap.org (OHM)
> instead, e.g.:
>
> * Adding Data about the venice republic to the OHM database
> * Documenting this process / improving OHM documentation in general
> * Implementing improvements to the OHM UI (e.g. adding a timeline slider)
>
> Our ideal final state would be to have a product similar of that of our
> predecessor (which bases on google maps), but on the open and modifiable
> framework of openhistoricalmap.org, such that following generations of
> students (or anybody actually) could add or improve on our work more easily.
>
> Our questions are the following:
>
> * What are your general thoughts about something like this?
> * What would be other possible tasks where both OHM and we as a team could
> profit?
> * Who is responsible for the GUI of OHM in general (or the time slider in
> particular) and could be contacted for directions/questions?
>
> Kind regards,
> Nicolas, Jan & Dennis
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Historic mailing list
> Historic at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/historic
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/historic/attachments/20150302/e755e0c4/attachment.html>