Carto Rewind

“Discover history and maps of our program's cities”
A sneak peak of the final product.

What it is about

The aim of this project is to present historical maps in an interesting and interactive way. Regarding city selection, we focused on the four locations where Cartography MSc programme takes place: Munich, Vienna, Dresden, and Enschede. Users can explore maps from different time periods alongside OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery. Currently, two of the four cities include a storytelling component, focusing on the historical storytelling via important landmarks in Munich and the urban evolution of Dresden.

How we built it

We started our work by collecting historical maps from online archives and different websites. ArcGIS Pro and QGIS were used to georeference the maps and prepare them for web use. Illustrations and graphical elements were created in Inkscape. We used VScode with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create the web application.

Challenges we ran into

We faced several challenges during the project. Finding suitable maps from earlier periods was difficult, as most pre-17th century maps could not be reliably georeferenced, which limited both the time range and the number of maps we could work with. We divided our work into two parts: a comparison web map and storytelling components, which we developed separately, and integrating them later caused some difficulties. Initially, we planned to use tiles to enable smooth zooming and panning; however, we had to change this plan to keep file sizes smaller, as each map became 150–200 MB after tiling. Additionally, coding was new to us, but AI helped a lot.

What we're proud of

We’re proud that we achieved our main goal to most extent. We collected historical maps, enabling their comparison with modern maps, and creating historical storytelling via important landmarks and urban evolution for two cities.

What we learned

We learned simple web programming skills and gained experience working with basic web tools such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We also realized how challenging historical data collection and implementation can be and improved our project coordination and time management.

What's next

In the future, we plan to find more suitable historical maps for these cities and include them in the project. We also aim to expand the storytelling component to cities beyond Munich as we spend semesters there and experience these places firsthand.
Screnshoot of map comparison window.
Landmarks of Munich.
Evolution of Dresden.

Sources

The old maps used in this project are primarily taken from the David Rumsey Map Collection, the Bavarian State Library, and other online libraries and archives. The historical information is mostly sourced from Wikipedia. To illustrate the formation of Dresden, maps from Krause, Bruno: The Historical Development of the Royal Capital and Residence City of Dresden from a Sorbian (Wendish) Village to the Present-Day Metropolis. Illustrated Booklet were vectorized.
Students
Jafar Saidov, Zhengqi Jiang

15th intake
Supervisor
Juliane Cron, M.Sc.
Keywords
Historical maps, history, landmarks, urban evolution
TRY IT
View poster