Historical Mapping
As I’ve been reading “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” I found myself wanting for maps of the era. Political boundaries were vastly different as well as names of geographic features. Although many of the geographical names are the same, Gibbon refers to them by their names in his time (the Euxine Sea springs to mind as evidence). I have successfully found their alternate names thanks to Wikipedia. However, it is a multi-step process to realize the location correctly and disruptive to the flow of reading. What I found wanting was a way to use maps.google.com in a historical manner: being able to determine a location by typing it in, along with the time it was referenced from. Sounds like a large task to complete a project of that size, no? I suppose a project of that manner would never be able to realize funding from venture capitalists, other than educational pursuits most don’t truly utilize history for anything profitable.
I did a quick search on historical mapping and came across an organization that has digitized a good number of maps and put them in a convenient format under the name of David Rumsey. I have no clue as to who David is, but he apparently collects maps and has enough technical savvy, desire, and capital to put this data out for others at no cost. Thank you David and whoever else is behind this initiative. May it continue on for a long time.
The most compelling feature of this site is the software that you can either run in your browser or download. By it one is able to search for keywords, then view the resulting list of maps zoom in to fine detail to find the appropriate name.
As a side note, the company that creates the software is Luna Imaging, Inc. which offers other collections that are possible to browse through and view.