History and Mapping

I like maps, so I especially enjoyed this week’s lab exercises, although it took me a while to settle on what I wanted to work on. First, I wanted to explore The David Rumsey Map Collection but my interest was in European maps, and I was disappointed that Rumsey’s collection focuses predominantly on North and South American maps. I was impressed, however, with the quality of the map images: I could zoom in quite far without the image becoming blurry and I really liked this.

What I was interested in doing with maps was overlaying some maps from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with present-day maps of Europe. Particularly, I was interested in overlaying maps of the camp system and maps of the railway systems from the 1940’s onto a map of Germany and Poland because I wanted a better sense of (particularly concentration) camps' proximity to urban centres, to see if it looked realistic for Germany’s city-dwellers to deny knowing about the treatment of Jews in these camps. My interest in the railway system was just to see where camps ended up being in relation to the railway system, if it appeared as I suspected that they were established along the rail system.

Somewhere on Map Builder, I saw the word ‘mash-up’ and thought that maybe I could try to do this on Map Builder; when it became apparent that that wasn’t what Map Builder did I moved to experimenting with Google Earth. Here I could overlay the maps I wanted to use.

It was pretty cool although a bit difficult to make the maps fit on top of each other; part of this was due to not being able to remove a lot of detail that was cluttering up the maps and making it hard to overlay them, but at the same time keep some of the detail as reference points for the map that I was trying to overlay. I also got frustrated for some other reasons. First, after I finished fitting my map on top of the Google Earth map I can’t go back and change it (and I realized I don’t have Switzerland quite in the right spot!). Second, I can’t figure out how to remove the maps that I added on top to start fresh (therefore I have a Google Earth map with an overlaid map of the Nazi camp system, and also a map of locations of the Death Marches, which I was experimenting with before using the rail system map – which I never got to because I couldn’t remove the marches map). My frustrations with Google Earth could (and quite likely are) related to user error/incompetence however.

Now that I knew what Map Builder could do (and not do) I went back to my account there and geocoded a map related to (you guessed it) some of my family history research. More specifically, I plotted the daily operations of Canadian 6 Group as part of RAF Bomber Command in January 1944. This month’s activities were of particular interest to me because my grandfather’s brother flew with this group and he was shot down over Berlin and killed January 27th 1944. I wanted to get a better understanding through the maps of what the operations for that month had been like and I plotted markers and operation information on cities that 6 Group bombed that month [red markers for high explosives and incendiaries, green markers for mining operations].

One thing that I really liked about Map Builder was that it made it easy to add the map you built into your own website, and I’m pretty excited about adding my map to my family history section of my genealogy website (click on the 'my maps' icon).

There were a few things that also frustrated me about the program. My biggest dislike (and again for these it could be just user-error) was that I could only search for locations in the USA. Even if I changed the country setting in the search options it only brought me results from the states. This made it difficult plotting the locations of my cities and I ended up looking them up on Google Maps and then searching for them on the Map Builder map which was time consuming.

The second thing that I didn’t like was that the markers were very exact and you couldn’t, for example, put a marker just on a city in general, because you could zoom in so far markers went on different streets and different areas of the city but there was no way to convey that I wanted to mark just the city in general and not a very specific spot within the city. I ran into this problem because most of the bombing campaigns targeted Berlin, and I wanted to be able to indicate that they struck Berlin but not specific locations within Berlin where I ended up having markers.