Our library is undertaking a project to map historical data regarding 18th and 19th century British and American printers and publishers. One of the problems that we have encountered is the different granularity of location data. For example, one publisher may list a street number, street name, and city whereas another publisher may only mention a street name or even only the city. In such cases, we are wondering the best way to georeference the location and present this vague data. Does the spatial humanities community have rules or conventions for dealing with these cases? Also, what are the most effective ways for visualizing “vague” vs “precise” geospatial data on the same map? Any suggestions or resources that you can offer would be greatly appreciated!
Best practice for representing imprecise historical geospatial data on a map?
(3 posts) (3 voices)-
I suspect the classicists have solved this best. The Pleiades project has a pretty nice set of conventions for dealing with uncertain geographical metadata--if I remember right (the site's not loading for me now) it involves a bounding box to give the outer limits of a point, and a separate field to show the level of uncertainty.
It tends to be ugly to put polygons on a map, though--I think the Barrington atlas (the print publication Pleiades draws from) just uses a dotted line or italics or something under the names of uncertain location.
Posted 4 years ago Permalink -
snesbit
MemberWe've thought about how to do this in our Visualizing Emancipation project at the University of Richmond. We used semi-opaque circles around a centroid to denote varying levels of uncertainty. It is a pickle for user interface design, especially if you have overlapping data that you want displayed simultaneously.
Posted 4 years ago Permalink
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