As part of a recent lecture on the Age of Exploration, I utilized Google
Earth to provide students with a sense of geographic scale comparing the
"known world" of the Renaissance to the realities of Earth geography. While
the integration of technology was well received by students (the WOW factor
does have its advantages), it bothered me that I couldn't display historical
borders showing the geo-political realities of the 16th Century world.
Little did I know that a potential solution existed!
David Rumsey, President of Cartography Associates and a fairly well known
academic in his own right, began digitizing a sizable collection of
historical maps about 12 years ago. The vast majority of this collection is
available online at http://www.davidrumsey.com/ and are free for
non-commercial use. But Rumsey has taken this a step farther. Working with
the folks at Google, a growing number of the historical maps are now
provided as overlays on Google Earth!
Because of differences in cartography over time, the older maps don't always
match up with the realities of modern land masses but that in and of itself
is a great teaching aid. Using the latest version of Google Earth (5.0),
educators can change the transparency of the overlays to move back and forth
between the current and the historical. All of the existing features of
Google Earth are also available even when the overlays are in place.
If there is interest, I am happy to post the techno-babble you will need to
set it up. As with many things Google, it is actually pretty straight
forward and, thankfully, makes use of existing technical standards. Google
has this nasty habit of providing these wonderful tools and not really
advertising it...but I suppose that is to my benefit because I can look like
the hero when I share it with others! :-)
TJ
--
TJ Rainsford
E: tjrainsford@gmail.com
[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
RSS Feed, http://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?RSS&L=ISED-L
