Slashdot Mirror
Atlas of US Historical Geography Digitized
memnock writes "Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932, has been digitized by The Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. From the website: 'Here you will find one of the greatest historical atlases: Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. This digital edition reproduces all of the atlas's nearly 700 maps. Many of these beautiful maps are enhanced here in ways impossible in print, animated to show change over time or made clickable to view the underlying data—remarkable maps produced eight decades ago with the functionality of the twenty-first century.'"
There goes my next 10 weekends :P
I can't seem to find what licence the above work is under.
Great - I can go and browse it.
Can I print out a cake with a small map from the above site on and sell it to commemorate a local event.
Or t-shirts?
Or...
oDBl, CC-by, Crowley, ...
Explore moments where third-party candidates affected the outcome of presidential elections.
I just came.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
As far as I can determine, the content should be in the public domain.
First, on the book itself. As a 1932 book, it isn't automatically public domain, since only books published before 1923 are old enough to automatically be public domain due to age. However, works published between 1923 and 1963 had to file copyright renewals after 28 years to receive an extended copyright, and it's estimated that Michael Lesk, the Stanford Library, and a transcription effort by Project Gutenberg volunteers, the complete book renewal records are now indexed in machine-readable / searchable form, so you can pretty reliably determine whether a book from 1923-1963 (assuming the U.S. was the original place of publication) is out of copyright. And this one does not appear to have had its copyright renewed.
Having determined that the original book is out of copyright, any scans of it are probably also out of copyright, since a scan of a work doesn't constitute a new creative work, merely a reproduction of the original, so a new copyright doesn't attach. The leading U.S. case there that's generally followed is Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel , which held that Corel wasn't violating Bridgeman Art Library's copyright by copying their JPGs of paintings from a CD-ROM, because JPGs of public-domain paintings don't get a new copyright. Though it isn't a Supreme Court case and isn't binding on all courts, it seems to be generally followed.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Dammit, this got garbled because Slashdot barfed on a less-than sign. What this should have said:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I didn't see any contact information for bug reports. For example, if I go to the plate at http://dsl.richmond.edu/histor... and hover my mouse over Boston, it reports a speed of about -3500 MPH. I doubt that people could fly at minus thirty five hundred miles per hour in 1930.
Great, I just discovered I live on the "island of thieves".
Project 'A'
1. scan/digitize and 'snap' maps to geo coords and add markup
2. create website using active server scripts and HTML/js for drag/zoom navigation
3. release to the world with great fanfare
4. site is slashdotted, then eventually settles down to several terabytes/mo bandwidth
5. one year in, site is on the radar of cost/benefit analysis as an escalating expense
6. two years in, routine site changes break the atlas with few to mourn it (and,or) the bean counters pull the plug on it
Project 'B'
1. just scan maps in high res, don't bother to 'snap' because they are not to be used for navigational porpoises. Embed them in low-loss huge PDF.
2. place the entire package on the BitTorrent network with the University committed to keeping a perpetual seed online
3. build a static website giving a low-res 'taste' of the product, instructing students on how to set up BitTorrent and explaining the advantages to human civilization if you obtain and browse your own local copy, and many people all over keep an archive of this this precious historical work.
4. ten years later, there are several thousand copies of the work stored on several continents, ten seeds online (including the University who never experienced any serious bandwidth inconvenience) and the walls of many places are adorned with countless prints of these maps.
I'm all for pointy and clicky forms of ENTERTAINMENT, but for the same purposes as is served by a library, Project B looks like a really sound endeavor.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
As someone who works in a University, the delivery system is more important than the cost benefits associated with infrastructure or P2P archival. The latter has no guarantees of spawning dozens or even hundreds of copies worldwide, and the pain of installing, securing, and teaching the operation of torrent for humanities faculty and researchers.
If you want a copy of the map, just email the folks. I bet they'll be happy to provide you with them. Ship them your external hard drive with a SASE. It's like the rare archives - just schedule a visit and you'll have a curator bring you out the rare books.
The high-res PDFs as a weblink has been tried in the past. My institution has digitized thousands if not millions of books already. In the end, people are just lazy or don't bother searching for them. At least it guarantees job security for our librarians. Torrent is just another added layer of tech difficulty.
The organization is wonderful - clicking through serial maps of settlements, the movement of slave populations, native populations, transportation modes is incredibly informative. When my grandparents we born there were two - count'em - two - actual cities in Arizona. No wonder they stayed in New England. What happened between 1800 and 1810 in LA that moves slaves there? Or the same in TX from 1840-1850?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
My thoughts also. The 1932 book looks like a wonderful resource and I would love to have a copy (both hardbound paper and pdf).
The enhanced web version (Project A) is fun, but I really wonder about the longevity of it versus a good PDF/A version (Project B).
Don't worry about the torrent distribution, but do setup a couple official mirrors.
I'm not a cartigrapher, but it looks like they did georectified to a bad cooridinate system. The original maps look more correct in many cases.
The relative distances are badly skewed between the north edge and the south edge.
Someone with better knowledge can describe the differences between different map projections and why this choice was wrong.
I've tried Firefox, Chrome and even IE but I've been unable to get the Animate button to do anything. It isn't always present, so I've been guessing that when it appears, it should be active. But it doesn't seem to be. Has anyone else been able to get it to work? If so, was there a trick and will you share it?
I'd rather have the karma go to someone with the decency to provide an articulate answer than any of the myriad sarcastic-aggressive trolls with ID numbers.
Doing A does not preclude doing B. In fact, they'd probably enjoy it if someone volunteered to do B.
My guess as to why they did A is:
1. There's the "ooh, shiny" effect that makes donors to the project know that their money went to what the grant applications said it was for.
2. The people who put it together probably believe (with good reason) that they might have expertise in fitting the maps together, and the goal of the project was more to make use of that expertise to make things more coherent than it was to simply put the maps online.
3. The maps are almost definitely available in their library to those who want them. They may even already have simple digital scans of the book available since it's public domain.
I am officially gone from
One problem is browser compatibility. All they let us use at work is IE 8, and the atlas doesn't appear to work in it.
But everybody can open a PDF.
If you want a < you need to enter <
There's no reason not to georeference the files under "Project 'B'". Doing so makes the resulting product much more useful to anyone who wants to bring the data into their local GIS software. Not doing so increases the amount of work required to make use of the maps and in practice will reduce the amount of usage the maps get.
If you're going to use the maps in any sort of professional setting, they need to be georeferenced. Might as well do that work up-front rather than forcing each individual user to do their own, slightly different, georeferencing.