What is that building? Who is this street named after? Where do those gates lead? With most of us spending more time at and around our homes, we are noticing things we haven’t spotted before. Whether you have lived there for a short time or for years there is always something new to discover. Many of us live away […]
Tag: maps
Mapping Around: Introducing Denoyer-Geppert’s Globe Gores
Examine a terrestrial globe and what do you see? A fascinating model of how we view the world? A historical snapshot of the various landmasses and water features we have encountered? Or are globes a political narrative reflecting the creator’s point of view?
Setting up a web-mapping interface for the Stevenson Collection
Written by Rachel Dishington, Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, and Chris Fleet, Map Curator. In a previous blog post, we described in detail the process of geocoding the Library’s Stevenson maps and plans of Scotland. This process generated a file that linked metadata describing over 2000 maps and plans to […]
Map of the Month: Planning a Capital City
Planning of a New “Federal City” After the success of the American Revolution, Americans were faced with a decision: where to build their capital. In a foreshadowing of future conflict, the main debate was whether this monumental city should be built in the North of the South. The South was unhappy with economic decisions after […]
Geocoding the Stevenson Maps and Plans of Scotland
Written by Rachel Dishington, Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD student at the University of Edinburgh The Stevenson family of engineers worked extensively throughout Scotland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their work focused primarily on coastal engineering projects, particularly harbours including at Peterhead as shown below. Most famously, they were responsible for the construction and […]
Digitising the Library’s Maps
By: Gabi Migdalska (Specialist Digital Production Operator ) and Rosemary Hall (Maps Assistant) The National Library of Scotland holds well over 1.5 million maps and counting. The collection ranges from manuscripts to single fold-out maps in books to Ordnance Survey series containing 1000s of sheets. Holding such extensive collections puts the Library in a unique […]
March’s Map of the Month: A map of Scotland. [Stitched by] Margaret Montgomery, circa 1800.
March is Women’s History Month and, in keeping with this theme, our Map of the Month is a map of Scotland, embroidered by a young girl over 200 years ago.