Why Mapping Your History Matters? | Intriguing Family History

What do maps do? Why are they important in history projects? How can you Map your history and how will this process help you make new connections and gain new insights?for your family, social, local or special interest history project.

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What do Maps Do Best?

Maps visualise complex geographical and spatial data, they help you navigate, they help you get an overview of where you are currently and the options for getting to your destination or even selecting your destination.

Traditionally when we think about history the first thought is dates, sequence and chronology, but that is only one dimension of history and it is relatively linear and therefore limiting. Unless we get into relativity and time-space continums, but fortunately that is a little ?off-course for this discussion. Maybe later..

Maps help us orientate ourselves, to the absolute position of a particular point on the the earth, fixed by?longitude?and latitude, with the relatively stable magnetic north, ?being our fixing point/direction or landmark.

If we take a family history or a one-name study for a?genealogical?project as an example, it is a bit like accounting, the records are not always complete, some are missing damaged or you don?t even know if they exist, there can be a lot of gaps and you can be more or less certain that beyond say the last 50 years, it will get harder and harder to create a complete timeline. So what can we do to get a better oversight of the data we do have?

• How can we add data, records, snippets bit by bit over time and try to make sense of the overall and much bigger picture?
• Can we use the basic navigational principle of finding points on the horizon, landmarks and such from which we can extrapolate and identify an emerging pattern in the data and better understand the context in whichsuch and such event took place on a known or unknown date?
• Can we get a sense of the relative position of an object, person or event on the map?
• Think life events for family history and data tags supported for instance,(see the linked reference to the potential codes embedded in a family tree file in the GEDCOM file format 5.5) for eaxmple, ?as well as the person, their family, their name, the date of the event, where the event occurred can be as important as when?
• When you have a number of people to track in your project, then maps become invaluable in being able to see another dimension that can reveal much about the relationships between place and individuals and the communities in which they lived worked and played. Census data is the perfect example, if you could plot your family groups and their characteristics against the wider census of the overall population nationally regionally and within the specific areas where your families lived what would that tell you? Wouldn?t it be interesting to be able to perform some high level analysis of your subjects and their families against the wider population in which they mixed?
• So hopefully it is already pretty apparent that maps provide an alternative way of visualising complex data sets that are simply not possible with just a ?family tree but it is much more fundamental than that?

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Why are maps important in History projects?

• Visualise apparently disparate and complex data
• Analyse and seek to reveal new patterns in the data
• Relate the geography to the history of place, work, home and family life and what the significance of that geography might be at a very granular and also at an?aggregated?level.
• Ability to?overlay?and link old and new data together and to provide contextual links to related data sets and data that is proximate and potentially significant to increasing our understanding of what what happened not only ?when? but where, to set a sense of place and be able to interact to see the topography and terrain, the roads and today even the current street view and stroll along the same roads
• The use of maps in history projects is essential but previously the ability to manually map and correlate complex data was limited by the tedious manual work it required and the memory needed to cross reference each of the source data-sets often written on different and unrelated documents?
• The advent of the GPS is another key element in why GIS (geographic information systems) and maps go hand in glove with history, we can overlay historic maps and with georeferencing actually see them on top of contemporary maps using precise absolute land and sea references checked and verified with the aid of a GPS.
• All this technology is available on most smart-phones and laptops, so there is no reason not to look to harness some mapping capability if you really want to move and then leap forward with your history project.

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How Can You Map Your History?

• You can Map your History now and with Intriguing History we are beginning to create a library of geocoded historical references, specific to the needs of family, social,local and special interest history projects.
• Historically it has been difficult to compare old maps with new but the ability to geocode contemporary and old place names using the absolute reference of the geocode (long,lat co-ordinates for a given address/location or place) has opened up a wealth of opportunities for mapping your history.
• My colleague Helen has been wanting to find a way to do this with faily history data for some years and that in part is what sparked us upon this adventure?How could be integrate a geographic dimension into our understanding of family history data.
• In effect we are working toward s a data model for our history projects, nothing as grand as the excellent work that is coming out of the Spatial History Project at Stanford University for large and complex data modelling but on a more human scale that will?accommodate?the needs and constraints of us amateur historians and enthusiasts.
• Its a bit like astronomy, we can?t all have a Hubble telescope but a starter kit will still enable us to enjoy and learn along the way?
• So how was the question can you map your history, well here is an early example of a free?collaborative?service we are hosting Intriguing History. It is just the first phase in a series of initiatives we are embarked upon to get a better tool set that integrates Mapping into your history project, it is just a starting point.
• It provides us with the ability to in parallel research and consider not only time and location but proximity to provide a new dimension for seeking to better understand what happens where and why using the dimensions of Time and Place and proximity of people places and events as well as the geographic context and history of the places mapped and their significance in the lives of those that lived in proximate communities.

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How will this process help you make new connections and gain new insights?

• Provide via the maps a visual metaphor by which to navigate through your data
• Enables new patterns to emerge and gaps and spaces to be better understood
• It provides a more lateral medium in which to consider and analyse what was the cause and effect over time
• It introduces another dimension into our analysis of our data proximity, what was nearby, what palces events and other historical and geographic factors influenced events
• It breaks out of the shackles of a largely linear family tree format,
• Creates a new and visual interface through which we can share and ?intuitvely navigate through the snippets of data, annotated and supplemented with an ever more informed narrative of the bigger picture
• There is much more that can be achieved, but using standard web technology and a little imagination we believe there is great potential.

To find out and experiment some more with Mapping Your History you can sign-up for periodic email updates, write a guest post on a subject that can be mapped or submit your feedback, response and ideas following on from this article and the demonstration of what we are seeking to achieve when developing the resources tools and techniques to enable you to map your history?Register for free updates to Intriguing History here with just your email address?

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Source: http://www.intriguingfamilyhistory.com/why-mapping-your-history-matters/

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