Maps of a Nation? The Digitized Ordnance Survey for New Historical Research

Bibliographic Data

ID8104682
AuthorsKasra Hosseini (0000-0003-4396-6019, The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK), Katherine McDonough (0000-0001-7506-1025, The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK, corresponding author), Daniel van Strien (0000-0003-1684-6556, The British Library, London, UK), Olivia Vane (0000-0002-3777-4910, The British Library, London, UK), Daniel C S Wilson (0000-0001-6886-775X, The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK), Daniel Wilson (0000-0002-3593-6234)
Year2021
Volume26
Issue2
Pages284-299
Publication date2021-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Victorian Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1355-5502 • E-ISSN: 1750-0133
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/jvcult/vcab009
OpenAlexW3154930710
LanguageEN
Citations received5

Although the Ordnance Survey has itself been the subject of historical research, scholars have not systematically used its maps as primary sources of information. This is partly for disciplinary reasons and partly for the technical reason that high-quality maps have not until recently been available digitally, geo-referenced, and in color. A final, and crucial, addition has been the creation of item-level metadata which allows map collections to become corpora which can for the first time be interrogated en masse as source material. By applying new Computer Vision methods leveraging machine learning, we outline a research pipeline for working with thousands (rather than a handful) of maps at once, which enables new forms of historical inquiry based on spatial analysis. Our ‘patchwork method’ draws on the longstanding desire to adopt an overall or ‘complete’ view of a territory, and in so doing highlights certain parallels between the situation faced by today’s users of digitized maps, and a similar inflexion point faced by their predecessors in the nineteenth century, as the project to map the nation approached a form of completion

Art · Comparative historical research · Darkroom · Data science · Discipline · Epistemology · Metadata · Parallels · Pipeline (software · Point (geometry · Quality (philosophy · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Visual arts · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Engineering · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History

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