In the last years, history education has become a highly developed field, which is receiving considerable attention not only from educators but also from historians, philosophers of history, and ...social scientists in general. In this vein, seminal empirical and theoretical papers have focused on how history is taught to students and what are the different abilities that should be developed with the end to critically understand historical processes. These abilities are related to key concepts in the field such as historical thinking, historical consciousness, and historical culture. The aim of this paper is to focus on a matter not much considered in any of these approaches. This is to say, “where” the historical processes occurred. Usually the “where” implies a specific territory that is under dispute. In this vein, territories and their transformation through different time periods are represented by historical maps reproduced in atlas and textbooks. But these representations could have several bias and also tend to provide a number of incomplete ideas among the students and citizens in general. In relation to this, it is necessary study not only the features of historical maps but, also, how students appropriate them. This appropriation could be influenced by an essentialist view of the nation through historical master narratives. This is what we have found in our initial empirical studies in Spain and Argentina. Additional empirical studies are needed to improve history education studies from the point of view of the development of historical thinking and historical consciousness taking into account how historical maps and territorial changes are represented by both students and textbooks.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a British mapping team led by Captain S. F. Newcombe surveyed and mapped the Negev region, Sinai, and western Jordan. The map was mainly produced for ...military use. Consequently, it included a network of branched routes, water supplies and facilities, and topographic contours. This study used this map to examine the development of routes in the Negev region between the beginning of and until the end of the twentieth century. First, the individual sheets comprising the study area were pieced together and the accuracy of the map was evaluated. The accuracy found on the Newcombe map was 0.76 mm on the map scale, equivalent to 100.3 m. Route development during the twentieth century was then evaluated by comparing the routes digitized from the Newcombe map to digitized routes on a late twentieth-century map. The results do not reveal tremendous changes in path, shape, or number of routes. Instead, they merely indicate the natural development in their quality. This Historical GIS-based approach provided a useful technique for analyzing and comparing the line segments extracted from historical and modern maps. The implemented approach may also serve other geographical or historical studies aiming to examine the development of branched networks throughout history.
The book ('Historical cartography of Slovenian territory') presents the history of cartographic development in Europe and Slovenian territory with a special emphasis on a uniform methodology of ...studying old maps. The introduction provides definitions of the basic cartographic terminology and discusses the importance of maps, their study, and the development of European cartography from its beginnings to the twentieth century. This is followed by a presentation of cartographic elements and their classification into five basic groups (i.e., natural, built, mathematical, and explanatory elements plus geographical names), and an analysis of their historical development. The main part of the volume presents the methodology for studying cartographic elements and the results of an analysis of fifty-eight medium-scale maps of what is now Slovenia from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. A list of basic information on the most important maps of Slovenian territory is added at the end as an appendix. Maps can serve as the basis for exploring and studying landscapes and their processes. Old maps provide original information and are thus considered primary historical sources. The methodology used in this volume makes it possible to study these primary sources in a uniform manner across longer time periods.
Marsh shorelines are retreating rapidly in coastal Louisiana, largely driven by wind waves attacking the marsh edge. The amount of wave power hitting the marsh is a major predictor for marsh retreat ...rates; however, marsh erodibility (erosion rate per unit of wave power) has a large spatial variability. Identifying the causes of this variability is essential to obtain more reliable predictions and to optimize marsh protection strategies. Here we investigate marsh edge erosion in a small (~3 km2) bay within Barataria Bay, LA, USA. Long-term (~140 years) erosion data and short term (~1 year) field measurements show that, for the same wave power, north-facing marsh edges erode twice as fast as south-facing marsh edges. A possible explanation might reside in the peculiar hydrodynamics of coastal Louisiana, where northerly winds are associated with low water levels and southerly winds are associated with high water levels. This causes south-facing shores to experience high water levels when being impacted by waves and north-facing shore to experience low water levels when being impacted by waves, which could subsequently affect marsh edge erosion in three different ways. First, south-facing shores experience a higher frequency of wave overshooting, which limits the ability of waves to cause erosion. Second, north-facing shores experience a higher frequency of waves impacting the highly erodible soil below the root mat, thus undercutting the marsh. Third, south-facing marsh edges have a higher elevation and a higher soil shear strength in the root layer (0–20 cm depth), likely because these shores receive more sediment during wave events. These three processes were combined into a single empirical correction to represent effective marsh erodibility and the correction was used in a 2D model of marsh edge retreat. The model accurately predicts marsh edge erosion and can be used to determine whether historical marsh loss was due to edge erosion or to other processes, such as ponding or drowning.
•Wind direction and speed drive large water level changes in coastal Louisiana.•Changes in water level drive different erosion mechanisms of the marsh edge.•We developed an empirical anisotropic correction for a 2D marsh retreat model.
•A deep CNN-based approach is developed to systematically extract roads from historical maps.•Training data are automatically generated through symbol reconstruction for training deep CNN ...models.•Four training scenarios are implemented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.•Symbol reconstruction can significantly enhance CNN prediction performance.
Historical road data are often needed for different purposes, such as tracking the evolution of road networks, spatial data integration, and urban sprawl investigation. However, road extraction from historical maps is challenging due to their dissatisfying quality, the difficulty in distinguishing road symbols from those of other features (e.g., isolines, streams), etc. Recently, although deep learning, especially deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have been successfully applied to extract roads from remote sensing images, road extraction from historical maps with deep learning is rarely seen in existing studies. Apart from this, it is time-consuming and laborious to manually label large amounts of training data. To bridge these gaps, this paper proposes a novel and efficient methodology to automatically generate training data through symbol reconstruction for road extraction. The proposed methodology is validated by implementing and comparing four training scenarios using the Swiss Siegfried map. The experiments show that imitation maps generated by symbol reconstruction are especially useful in two cases. First, if little manually labelled training data are available, models trained on imitation maps alone can already provide satisfactory road extraction results. Second, when training data from imitation maps are mixed with real training data, the resulting models even outperform the models trained on real data alone for some metrics, thus indicating that imitation maps can be a highly valuable addition. This research provides a new insight for fast and effective road extraction from historical maps using deep learning.
The book presents a wealth of historical cartographic representations of Slovenian territory. It is divided into two main parts. The first or the text part briefly presents the history of European ...cartography up to the end of the nineteenth century, maps of the Slovenian territory up to the early twentieth century and maps as cultural heritage. In the second or cartographic part, in turn, features important historical maps of the Slovenian territory presented in chronological order. The format of the book enables an excellent presentation of the presented maps. The maps presented date from the mid-sixteenth century, when the first independent maps of present-day Slovenia were produced, to the beginning of the twentieth century, when cartography developed into a modern discipline. The aim of this book is to present the extensive Slovenian cartographic heritage.
With a multi-perspective approach and transdisciplinary methods (humanities and sciences), this book offers an in-depth and systematic study of hand-drawn and hand-coloured maps from East Asia. Map ...colouring provides an insight into past societies, landscapes and territories. Colour is an important key to a more precise understanding of the map’s content, purposes and uses; moreover, colours are also an important aspect of a map’s materiality. The material scientific analysis of colourants makes it possible to find out more about maps’ material nature and their production as well as the social, geographical and political context in which they were made. ‘Reading’ colours in this way gives a glimpse into the social lives of mapmakers as well as map users and reveals the complexity of the historical and social context in which maps were produced and how the maps were actually made.
This lavishly illustrated book is the first systematic exploration of cartographic cartouches, the decorated frames that surround the title, or other text or imagery, on historic maps. It addresses ...the history of their development, the sources cartographers used in creating them, and the political, economic, historical, and philosophical messages their symbols convey. Cartouches are the most visually appealing parts of maps, and also spaces where the cartographer uses decoration to express his or her interests—so they are key to interpreting maps. The book discusses thirty-three cartouches in detail, which range from 1569 to 1821, and were chosen for the richness of their imagery. The book will open your eyes to a new way of looking at maps.
Lake wetlands (LWs) are essential components of the ecosystem and play an irreplaceable role in flood regulation, carbon fixation, and biodiversity maintenance. Continuous monitoring of LWs’ change ...is necessary in the context of increased human disturbance and climate change, particularly in Taihu Lake Basin, China, an area exposed to early human exploitation. Yet, long-time series of LWs detection in this region is still unavailable due to the data limitation. To quantify the spatiotemporal dynamics of LWs and the associated driving forces, we combined 236 historical topographic maps and thousands of Landsat satellite images from the 1910s to 2021 to delineate the centennial-scale changes of lake wetlands for the first time in this region. We also applied land use transitions and statistical analyses to quantitively explore the climatic and anthropogenic factors behind LWs variations. Our results document a dramatic decline in the area and number of LWs in the Taihu Lake Basin over the last century and a shift in the 2000s: Taihu Lake Basin has seen a total of 89.15% loss in lake littoral wetlands and a decrease of 14.5% in the whole lake wetlands area, with a net reduction of 68 (from 156 in the 1910s to 88 in the 2021) lakes. This decrease has been especially predominant during the 1910s–2000s, because of the policy initiatives for reclamation and aquacultural industries. The area and number of LWs have gradually been recovered since the 2000s as the country strengthened concern on the ecological restoration and sustainable development. The statistical results suggested that human activities played a dominant role in the LWs changes, with GDP and population explained 80.74% of the changes, coupled with climatic contribution of only around 20%. This long-term investigation will provide baseline information for future lake wetlands monitoring. Our findings could also provide a guidance for decision makers regarding water resources management, environmental protection and land-use planning in urban areas.
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•Hundred-year lake wetlands patterns in Taihu Lake Basin were reconstructed by historical maps and Landsat images.•The first centennial-scale (1910s–2020s) lake wetlands trajectory in Taihu Lake Basin was built.•44.3% of lakes disappeared and lake wetlands shrank by 14.5% over the last one hundred years.•Rapid loss of lake wetlands trends shifted by the 2000s.•Agricultural reclamation/aquaculture and policy initiatives played a dominant role in driving lake wetlands change.
Unlocking data from historical maps for landscape analysis is costly. Automatic extraction using Machine Learning (ML) requires extensive preparation and expertise. Crowdsourcing scales better than ...direct digitisation by experts, but requires an appropriate platform and the technical skills to adapt it. Existing research provides little guidance as to when investments in these approaches become worthwhile. Here we present a customisation of the Field Acquired Information Management Systems (FAIMS) Mobile platform tailored to offer a streamlined, collaborative system for crowdsourcing map digitisation by volunteers with no prior GIS experience. Deployed in Bulgaria as an ancillary activity during 2017–2018 archaeological fieldwork, FAIMS Mobile was used to digitise 10,827 mound features from Soviet military topographic maps. This digitisation required 241 person-hours (57 from staff; 184 from novice volunteers), with an error rate under 6%. The resulting dataset was consistent, well-documented, and ready for analysis with a few hours of processing. A conservative estimate based on our work suggests our crowdsourcing approach is most efficient for digitisation projects of 10,000–60,000 features, but may offer advantages for datasets as small as a few hundred records. Furthermore, it indicates that systems designed for field data collection, running on mobile devices, can be profitably customised to serve as participatory geospatial data systems accessible to novice volunteers.
•Over 10,000 features digitised with 57 h of staff time and 184 volunteer hours.•Mobile application provides better user experience for volunteers than desktop GIS.•Historical map digitisation crowdsourced with offline, open-source mobile application.•Crowdsourcing most efficient for datasets of 10,000–60,000 features.•Crowdsourcing complements machine-learning in historical map digitisation.
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