Interviewed by OpenCageData

I was recently interviewed by Ed Freyfogle of OpenCageData.

Ed asked some questions about this blog which I had to think about a bit. I'm not sure if I've explained myself very well, but, in case you missed it, the interview is here.

At some stage when I've cogitated on these answers even more I might expand them directly on the blog.

Finding ones way around Buenos Aires in 1870: a proof-of-concept for routing with OpenHistoricalMap data

A critical point about using OpenStreetMap technologies in OpenHistoricalMap is that we should get lots of useful tools for free.

Plaza de Mayo 25, Buenos Aires in the 1860s
Source: Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA

We touched on this point during our end-of-year Google Hangout. In particular Karl Grossner. wanted to know more about how one might use the data for routing. Karl is part of the team behind the awesome ORBIS project at Stanford, which allows routing across Europe during the Roman Empire.

City Stripping : building historical road layouts from todays data

Street map of Buenos Aires 1895 (plano de Basch)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

For at least one year I have been thinking about the best way to create vector streetmaps for different historical periods for the same city. The basic principle is simple: take the existing street layout and remove what is new! Essentially, this presumes that any current vector data will be more precise than digitising vectors from old maps.

I have even given the process a name: "City Stripping", but in practice my attempts so far have been less successful than I hoped. I think that  I kept too much existing OpenStreetMap data in my first attempts, because in practice I found it easier to re-trace the old data (as here for Tartu/Dorpat).

WWII Bombs in Nottingham : discovering local history whilst mapping

Last Saturday I showed 2 visitors how I mapped addresses (more on this later).

Infill housing, St Cuthbert's Road, Nottingham NG3

One little vignette stood out.

Editing historical road layouts : Persistence in the Urban Landscape 3

It's a while since I've written a post on the theme of persistence in urban landscapes, and this despite covering some additional examples in my talk at SotM13 in Birmingham. This post takes one example I included in that talk: how road layouts persist.

However, I have also used it as a convenient hook to discuss how we might enable the capture of such data for something like OHM (Open Historical Map). I hope the latter discussion might provoke further ideas from those interested in developing OHM and both links with Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata in the future.

Derby Road, Nottingham

Current OSM Map of Derby Road compared with
Sanderson's Map of 1835. Changes in alignment marked with arrows

I've touched on the history of Derby Road before. Here I'll show what I know of it's history in detail from around 1800. The key point is that the basic line of the road has changed very little: the major changes being well understood and mostly comprehensively documented by the Lenton Local History Society.