Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 9, Mapping with Other People

#98 Give Your Great-Great-Grandfather a GPS

HACK

own custom base map, you need to create a file resembling, for example,

http://mapbureau.com/basemaps/sanfrancisco.0.xml. See http://mapbureau.

com/rdfmapper/ for comprehensive documentation on creating base map

files.

HACK

#98

Give Your Great-Great-Grandfather a GPS Hack #98

Learn how to geocode historic documents.

Tracklogs are simply a series of points. We don’t need a GPS to create a

series of points. In this hack, we’ll take an Oregon Trail diary and geocode it

to create a series of waypoints. You can thus create tracklogs of events that

predate the creation of the GPS system.

Alfred Korzybski wrote, “The map is not the territory.” And nowhere is this

more clear than when following the traces of your ancestors. Taking a drive

along the Oregon Trail, spending a long weekend eating convenience store

food and camping in the car, clambering over fences in order to stand

exactly where your great-great-grandfather stood or, more likely, simply

passed by with a tired sigh, is an experience of assembling an internal real-

ity, an experience of connecting with the past. As must be the case, these

Figure 9-12. Map Bureau map of San Francisco Open Guide

Give Your Great-Great-Grandfather a GPS #98

Chapter 9, Mapping with ...