The Geospatial Historian, modeled after the Programming Historian, is a “tutorial-based open access textbook for historians and digital humanists that aim to teach digital mapping and GIS skills.” Current lessons include Google Maps and Google Earth, Installing QGIS and Adding Layers, Creating New Vector Layers, and Georeferencing. The site editors are looking for additional contributions – contact jim.clifford@usask.ca to join the project.

Looking for an easy way to use maps in your web project? Check out Stately, a simple way to make state-level choropleth maps of the United States using HTML and CSS. Ben Markowitz of Intridea developed this symbol font, wherein each state functions as a glyph within the font. Use HTML list items for states and CSS to color each state – it’s that straightforward.

In preparation for their March 10 SXSW Interactive session, Why Digital Maps Can Reboot Cultural History, Butch Lazorchak (Digital Archivist, Library of Congress) and Matthew Knutzen (Geospatial Libarian, NYPL) discuss digital geospatial tools, using maps to tell stories, and digital stewardship and preservation issues in mapping projects. Knutzen goes step-by-step through the NEH-funded New York City Historical GIS Project and the MapWarper tool that NYPL Labs built to georectify over 5,000 maps from the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division at the New York Public Library.

At Spellbound Blog, Jeanne Kramer-Smith has posted on a session from The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation conference, sponsored by UNESCO in cooperation with the University of British Columbia and held in September 2012 in Vancouver. Untangling the acronyms, Kramer-Smith identifies the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) as part of the International Council for Science. CODATA hosts the Data at Risk Task Group (DARTG), which seeks “to preserve scientific data that is in danger of loss because they are not in modern electronic formats, or have particularly short shelf-life.”

In summarizing talks included in the session and helpfully linking out to presenters’ slides, Kramer-Smith also provides an opportunity to consider the implications of data preservation and loss– including for DH and libraries. As she notes in her summary of a presentation by D. R. Fraser Taylor and Tracey Lauriault, of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University, on “The Map as Fundamental Source in the Memory of the World”:

“The 1986 BBC Domesday Book [sic] was created in celebration of 900 years after William the Conqueror’s original Domesday Book. It was obsolete by the 1990s. A huge amount of social and economic information was collected for this project. In order to rescue it they needed an Acorn computer and needed to be able to read the optical disks. The platform was emulated in 2002-2003. It cost 600,000 British pounds to reverse engineer and put online in 2004. New discs were made in 2003 at the UK Archive.

“It is easier to get Ptolomy’s maps from 15th century than it is to get a map 10 years old.”