Historical Maps LAM

Mapping The Smith Campus

In this module, Professor Helene Visentin, of the French Department at Smith College, presents how technology helps her bring antique maps of Paris, France, into her literature classes. Overlaid with actual maps of Paris rendered by Google Maps, the old maps are scaled and rotated to match, as best as possible, the modern maze of Paris streets, and can be shown with various level of opacity. A set of sliders allow the user to overlay several maps on top of each other, or on top of the modern map.

In the module developed for the CS I class, the lab takes the student through the exercise of digitizing a map of the Smith College campus, creating a CSV file with the coordinates of the polygons defining the shapes of the buildings, and creating a new map with the coordinates.

The homework part of this module asks the students to merge the csv file containing the coordinates of the building with a second file that contains the year of construction of each building. This allows the generation of a map of the campus where each building is color-coded by its year of construction.

Guest Lecture: Professor Helene Vizentin

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3