Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend a meetup to discuss Pastmapper, the awesome historical web mapping project that seeks to recontextualize historic mapping with a contemporary interface. Self defined, Pastmapper "is a new platform for organizing data using the visual language of online maps to describe the world of the past. It’s also the manifestation of months that I’ve spent tracing old maps in Illustrator, learning to hack together code with the Google Maps API, and cramming 19th century city listings into a database."
The idea was to get a number of people who are interested and engaged in historical research and mapping together to talk about the project, our own work, and how Pastmapper might move forward.
One of the most engaging portions of the meetup was Eric Fischer (@enf) describing his interest in false maps of the past and maps of potential futures. These include the mapping of the mythical Laguna Dolores in San Francisco, and the plans to cover nearly the entire eastern portion of San Francisco in freeways during the late 1950s. Both of these situations ended up not being true, though mapped and published as if they were (or were going to be).
Brian Mount (@brian_mount) discussed his work in creating a web app that allows users to modify San Francisco streets. He discussed the ability to move curb lines to make streets more narrow, close streets, and create a transportation grid of possibility rather than inevitability.
These comments and the interest generated by everyone at the Pastmapper meetup really made me think about how there is so much geospatial information generated in web mapping applications that isn't retained in any way. As today's users encounter Brian's app or planners work on creating the new bicycle utopia in San Francisco, there's literally no way to see what possibilities are created. That blindess of today's possibilities extends to tomorrow's understanding of today. If we couldn't see what the plans were for San Francisco before the Freeway Revolt of 1959, contemporary roads in the city wouldn't make as much sense. Besides, who doesn't feel smug at being able to know the future when looking at the past?
While talking about Pastmapper, which is, itself, an amazing platform for mapping the space of the past, today, false maps of the past, and possible maps of the future, I realized that there are some possibilities for GeoData@UC Berkeley and Open Geoportal to become a platform where geospatial musings can live on and be discovered in the future. It will take some work to figure out how to technically make the connections, but is something worthwhile to investigate.
