Historic Maps
Historic Maps for a Digital Gazetteer for Hampshire Free and Open to All
The start of a small collection of maps of Hampshire and the places within it, that have featured in its history to help inform a view of where as well as when and with whom events have occurred. Our aim is to create useable and actionable data images and resources that you can not only read and view but use if you so wish within your own projects. Open access for all.
We are also working on some Digital Humanities approaches to various sub-projects including an open access Digital Gazetteer of Hampshire to help us explore and see what new insights we can gain into the history of Hampshire. We will be working on this step by step and plan to integrate the maps with some open source GIS and mapping applications that will be free for anyone to use, add-to or supplement in due course. We are very mindful of the wonderful Norgate project that predates this project (more in related projects posts here), and the Vision of Britain project which sadly and unfortunately is not open access to the public other than as per the web pages. Access to the maps requires affiliation with a university, and no it doesn’t make sense to us either. There is inspiration also from the Spatial History endeavours around the world and in particular from Stanford’s fabulous lead in these areas.
Mapping Hampshire’s History for All to Digitally Share
These resources are for anyone with a casual interest, a local, family, micro-history, social or special interests within or across the county.
Our approach is to use and share sources either available in the public domain already or via direct acquisition of old maps we can share digitally and provide on a Creative Commons basis as a minimum. In the full spirit of share and share alike, this is an open project. And yes it may well take some time but it is a labour of love and we want to undertake these projects as well as we possibly can.