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Archive: 2021 (7 Posts)

View of First Avenue. Power lines hang across the road, where a street car is driving down the road. Pedestrians fill the sidewalk.

Walking Seattle’s Streets A Hundred Years Ago

Posted by: Meagan Snow

Let’s journey back a hundred years in time to the downtown streets of Seattle, Washington. On a clear day, you can see the Olympic Mountains from the fish markets along Railroad Avenue. Eddie Carlson, who will one day bring the 1962 World’s Fair – and the Space Needle – to Seattle, is now just a …

Detailed map of the Andersonville prison stockade with descriptive text and measurements

The Maps of Andersonville Prison

Posted by: Meagan Snow

Andersonville Prison, arguably the most horrific Confederate prison for Union soldiers, was constructed in 1864 during the US Civil War and was located a little over a hundred miles south of Atlanta, Georgia. The prison was constructed as an open-air stockade with walls made of pine logs at least fifteen feet high. During its fourteen …

Route map showing the lines and stops of the Gospel Temperance Railraod

Fast-Track to Destruction City Aboard the Gospel Temperance Railroad

Posted by: Meagan Snow

Though much of the history of cartography involves map-makers striving to capture the world in increasingly accurate scientific detail, sometimes the domain of the map-maker is to capture the plane of imagined, metaphorical, allegorical, or even spiritual.  Such is the journey you’ll take on the “Gospel Temperance Railroad,” a 1908 map creation by George E. …

1853 Pilot Chart showing wind speeds

From Telegrams to Weather Apps: A Brief History of Wind Mapping

Posted by: Meagan Snow

Today it’s easy to check the weather without even leaving the house: hourly predictions for rain, wind, temperature, and humidity are available to most of us through our phones at the touch of a button. Warnings for severe weather flash across our screens to help keep us safe – but how did we get here? …

Georeferencing: Moving Analog Maps into Modern-Day GIS

Posted by: Meagan Snow

Have you ever wondered how historic maps can be used with today’s modern mapping technologies? One of the ways in which analog maps can be used with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) is through a process called georeferencing. Georeferencing is the process of adding digital spatial reference information to an otherwise non-spatial image. Adding spatial reference …