Creating Historical Maps
Last week I learned how to create a map using Google Maps and view it through Google Earth. This week’s assignment was to create a historical map using these same tools. But I thought to myself, why recreate the wheel if there is already a map available? I was interested in the bombings in London during World War II known as the “Blitz”, so I conducted a search through Google and found a site culled “Bomb Sight, Mapping the WW2 Bomb Census”. This site had all the geological data and images that I learned about both this week and last. The initial map shows London in 1940 covered by a big red blob that indicates where the bombs fell; this blob totally obscures the map of London and its visual impact was huge on me; how could a city have survived such magnitude of bombings? When you zoom in on the map you start to see the individual bomb sites and there are pins that indicate what type of bomb was dropped, it gives you both the past and present day history of the site and often times pictures. Very powerful imagery, especially when seeing where the bombs fell on residential areas.
Front a historical research perspective this map provides all kinds of useful information such as the number of bombs dropped nightly, the type of bomb and its impact on the site, the number of casualties produced by the bombing, and the viewpoint that there doesn’t seem to be a specific target area or type. The objective seems to be to create as much damage as possible with little thought to destruction of military or industrial sites though these were part of the target area. The data on this maps is available in multiple formats; graphs, charts, spreadsheets, scanned photos as well as text which helps the researcher find what their looking for a assists with extracting the info for their own practical use.
So when thinking about creating a historical map, I would suggest searching the web to see if the data you might be trying to find is already available and save yourself I lot of time. If there is no map available, creating one give the researcher and any audience a powerful tool, using varied formats that can be quite impactful to his subject.