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Library of Congress Map Collections from 1500's
e03179 writes "A friend of mine stumbled across this
site from the US Library of Congress.
The website allows users to view maps that go all the way back to the 1500's (like
this one
of America in 1562). The maps have been converted to digital form (SID format
- viewer available here)
but are viewable in .GIF form
in your browser. I was able to look up my hometown during 1871 and see the church in which I'm getting married. Who thought the LOC could be so 31337?"
Why aren't there SVG versions available? Icons are great in SVG, but one area where SVG can really strut it's stuff is maps.
Kind of ironic how slashdot links to burnallgifs.org while practically every image on here is in gif format as well..
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Oh, and thanks for the red herring link to the burn all gifs website, keep your politics to yourself or at least warn that it's not to LOC gif images.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
MrSID format is fairly intelligent. I had the pleasure of working with some Perl code which impliments the UI, and calls a compiled program to shove out the .GIF. Ported a good chunk to PHP, streamlined it a bit, and did some overlay magic on it.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Has /. paid the devil
Or will we see:
News Item: UNISYS sues Slashdot.
Surely you jest. LIbraries are the oldest and ultimate repository of geek-ness. WHat could be more 31337.
Interestingly, the world's first library just reopened a couple of days ago.
Or you could visit this extraordinary place.
Think back to SnowCrash, that piece of geek required reading...
(for the uninitiated, the Protagonist of SnowCrash is a uber-hacker of sorts who freelances doing data mining for the library of congress. He also delivers pizza for the Mafia, or did until he crashed his car.)
Size of Slashdot's logo (title.gif): 3473 bytes
Size of Slashdot's logo as a PNG: 2558 bytes
Savings of 915 bytes
That's a savings of nearly a gig per million downloads. Imagine the savings when you do all the other graphics on the site, too.
I never understood that one ... couldn't I tile pentagons and break the therom ?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I love old maps on weekends; by day, I love modern spatial datasets at the large earth-science agency at which I work (OK, it's a part of the Dept. of Injustice as referenced in a recent /. article on the 100% M$ solution. My team is about 50% Mac, 40% Win, 10% *nix - but that's OT).
Maps can be considered a superset of the relational/OO database; x, y, z and t have special properties (try indexing on x and y). If you'd like to learn more of this facinating topic, do the usual searches but be sure to include GIS (geographic information system, not guessing is simpler, as some have suggested).
Cheers from a first-poster. /. is great!
The United States didn't come into existence until the 1700's, however, America, the two continents, first received that name in 1507.
I have a few maps of my hometown that predate the oldest LOC maps of the area (mine are from early 1800s). Does anyone know of a method to submit maps for archival? (I don't really want to give them away, but I would like to see them digitally archived)
Not exactly.
America (the landmass) has been inhabited for several thousands of years.
"People" began arriving in America between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago via the Bering Strait.
Columbus arrived here in 1492 as (supposedly) the first European.
Virginia Dare was the first American child born of European parents in 1587.
The Declaration of Independence was finished on July 4, 1776, creating the United States of America
An interesting sorite. When did America come into existance???
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
From what I've heard, slightly earlier versions of IE on Windows had semi-cruddy PNG support.
All right, hands up everybody who uses old (and therefore, with security holes big enough to peg a rock through) versions of IE.
What, no one? How surprising, considering how tolerant and understanding /.ers are on these issues. :)
They have movies of people in SF in the early 1900s, sheet music of civil war songs, photos of old mining towns in Colorado, recordings of appalachia string bands, etc, etc.
One of my favorite sites on the web, and always being updated with more Olde Shite. recommended.
That site is great. The other handy thing about it is the indications of what areas were yet unexplored at the time. By looking at a map of the era I know what fuzzy unknown wilderness areas are ripe to be populated with all sorts of Bad Guy hideouts and such.
On another note, I noticed an awful lot of the birds-eye artist rendition maps are from the Wisconsin area, where I live, and I thought that was a bit odd. It turns out the reason for it is that the Library of Congres' project of comissioning maps of all the new cities happened to be in effect at about the time the artist's birds-eye rendition was in vouge, which was also about the time this part of the country was starting to be heavily settled.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
To render that 3-page printout of the seattle map, I had to download the linux version of the MrSID viewer, download the SID file, and display it that way (the web interface scales gifs down to 640x400 at most).
Here's some stuff about the MrSID view (at least the linux version. I didn't try any of the other ports).
1 - All it lets you do is view on the screen. It has no "print" option.
2 - It does have the ability to dump out to a number of common image file formats, but it only dumps out the image at the resolution being displayed currently on the screen, so it cannot make an image larger than your screen's resolution.
3 - I know the SID files are actually capable of much higher resolution than that.
4 - So what I ended up having to do to make the big hi-res version of the image was to have MrSID zoom in on various sections of the picture, and save those zoomed-in areas as seperate files.
5 - Then I glued the seperate images together in GIMP into one big image. This I had to do visually since there was no way to tell MrSID to size itself to a specific section of the image by coordinates,
and so my zoomed-in dumps had overlapping bits.
Summary: The site is very very cool, but the MrSID viewer you have to use to get the full resolution images is annoying. I'd much rather just download the large version as a really big JPEG and use whatever image editor I feel like once I have it.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.