Toward Spatial Humanities by Gregory Ian N. Geddes Alistair

Author:Gregory, Ian N., Geddes, Alistair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2014-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

4.3. Sample field survey sheet from the Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain, showing part of Newick, Sussex. These six-inches-to-one-mile (1:10,560) Ordnance Survey maps were issued by the Land Utilisation Survey to schools and then by the schools to individual pupils, who hand-annotated them to record land use: a very simple set of polygons and attributes. They were then returned to the Survey and although some have been lost, the London School of Economics Archives hold a large collection. Reproduced by kind permission of Audrey N. Clark and Giles Clark.

Our first problem was establishing who owned copyright in the maps. The Ordnance Survey base maps had clearly been in Crown Copyright, but this lasts for only fifty years. An initial assumption was that the LSE owned some rights, but in 1936 it made Stamp sign an agreement taking full personal responsibility for the LUSGB. He was a very successful author of geography textbooks, so his personal resources were significant, and he established and owned a company, Geographical Publications Ltd., that published the maps. It is absolutely clear that Stamp was the principal author of the maps, and copyright therefore runs for seventy years from his death in 1966. He left the company to a member of his team, with whom we have established contact. She and her son have been enormously supportive of our work.

A second problem was assembling and scanning a complete set of good quality copies of the maps: our university had some, the Environment Agency bought a significant number from a dealer, and the LSE was able to sell us some mint-condition maps from unsold stock. However, the most important sources were other university map libraries, which freely lent us maps from their collections for scanning. Similarly, we were eventually able to include the unpublished maps of upland Scotland at minimal cost: a commercial republisher of historical maps was scanning a large number of other maps at the Royal Geographical Society and did the LUSGB maps for us, while the RGS also imposed no charge.

Once all the maps had been scanned by ourselves or our partners, georeferencing and the construction of a seamless mosaic were time-consuming but straightforward. The only real complication was that the georeferencing had to be done without using modern Ordnance Survey (OS) copyright data, as otherwise the OS would have been able to claim rights in the final product. However, our collection already included a digital version of the late 1940s New Popular Edition of one-inch maps, which was the first edition to include the modern National Grid, making it trivially easy to georeference. We georeferenced the LUSGB map scans by overlaying them on the relevant New Popular scans.

The large remaining problem is the systematic extraction of vector features from the georeferenced images, and this work is continuing. One way of doing this would be to manually construct polygons by tracing around each color zone on each map, but this would be very time-consuming and expensive, costing upward of £200,000. The alternative approach

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.