Exploring Old Maps
Many libraries own an extensive collection of historical maps. Beside their value as historical objects, these maps are an important source of information for researchers in various scientific disciplines. This ranges from the actual history of cartography and general history to the geographic and social sciences. With the progressing digitisation of libraries and archives, these maps become more easily available to a larger public. A basic level of digitisation consists of scanned bitmap images, tagged with some basic bibliographic information such as title, author and year of production. In order to make the maps more accessible, further metadata describing the contained information is desirable. This would enable more user-friendly interfaces, relevant queries of a database, and automatic analyses.
Targeted Audience
The purpose is to provide a forum for the communication of results (which may appear elsewhere) that may be useful to the community. Researchers and practitioners of all areas working on unlocking the content of old maps are welcome to participate. We welcome humanities scholars, developers, computer and information scientists as well as librarians, archivists and curators. Submissions are welcome from researchers at all career stages.
Scope of Interest
Relevant topics are (but are not limited to) the following:
- Digital media, digitisation, curation of digital objects
- Design and application of algorithms for analysis and visualisation methods
- Spatial analysis and applications of GIS concerning old maps
- Crowdsourcing, user research, citizen science, and public humanities
- Digital Libraries for old maps
- Visualisation of old maps
- Virtual Research Environments and Infrastructures