Maps and Historical Enquiry: Critical Approaches in Digital Contexts

Each online library has its advantages and disadvantages, and these vary depending on the intended use of the resources and the research question(s) being studied. For some projects, a simple map giving an overview of a certain region may be sufficient; other projects may necessitate very large-scale maps, including detailed information about the date of production, the publisher, etc. In any case, the information provided by a map repository should allow historians to establish with certainty the provenance of the map and the available resources.

The following list is a selection of online map libraries that may be of interest for historians. There are many more, but we can start exploring here:

OldMapsOnline

David Rumsey Map Collection

Virtuelles Kartenforum

Arcanum Maps - The Historical Map Portal

Virtual Map Collection

Mapster

Please follow the links provided above. Select at least three repositories and compare them by looking for the following information:

1. Who is the creator of the website?

2. What is the purpose of the website?

3. What kind of maps does the website provide? Explore the geographic/ thematic scope and language(s) available

4. How are the maps displayed? You may find static images (photos of digitised maps) or more interactive artefacts – known as geographic information systems – that provide several layers of information (more on these in assignment 4).

5. Can the maps be downloaded and reused (republished, remixed, etc.) without copyright restrictions? What kind of explicit permission do the users have, if any?

Maps convey both explicit and implicit information about the time, place and perceived realities they represent. To contextualise and critically evaluate maps as historical sources, systematic descriptive information, known as metadata, is essential. The availability and quality of these metadata are a key added value that archives offer to historians. The following exercise invites you to explore this dimension and to understand how important it is in critically assessing both the repository and the map itself.

Compare topographic maps which you can find at Kartenforum and Arcanum.

1. Pick one map you find interesting in each of these repositories
2. Explore what kind of additional information you can find for each map: date of publication, date of digitisation, publisher, author, etc.

Now reflect on the following:

1. Is there information you need that is missing? If so, why might that be?
2. What would you define as the advantages and disadvantages of these two online libraries? Think in terms of accessibility, possibility of reuse, available information or anything else that comes to mind.
3. What sort of research might be done with the maps provided?

At least two of these websites, OldMapsOnline and Virtuelles Kartenforum, involve the active participation of volunteer contributors who are not part of the institution or team that runs the map repository.

Tip – to find this information, explore the “about” or “community” pages.

Explore these two repositories based on the following questions:

1. What are volunteer contributors asked to do? What is the purpose of involving them?

2. How do volunteer contributors actually contribute in practice? What do they need to do to be able to contribute? Are there specific parts of the website dedicated to this collaborative aspect?

3. Are there specific instructions volunteer contributors need to follow (guidelines) or is anyone allowed to contribute as they wish?

4. How are the contributions checked and approved?

5. How are the contributions credited? Are contributors visible or rewarded?

Now reflect on the following question: would these contributions be possible without the existence of a website? If there had not been a website, could external users have found another way to get involved and contribute their knowledge? Reflecting on this should help you to understand how digital technologies and the web enable the formation of communities around domains and resources of perceived shared interest. Such “zones” can bring historians into contact with citizen science and participatory practices.

Volynskaya, Alina. “Chapter 1: Traditional Archive, Knowledge Repository and the Digital”. In Digital Archives of Science: Revisiting the Vestiges of Knowledge-Making, 23-37. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2026. DOI

Salimi, Hamid, Somayeh Fadaei Nezhad Bahramjerdi, and Rana Tootoonchi. 2025. “The Role of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in Participatory Conservation of Heritage Areas”. European Journal of Geography 16 (1):s1-s11. DOI

To understand what a map projection is and how distortion is inherent to it, please read the introduction of the Wikipedia article.

Then watch the 6-minute video “Why all world maps are wrong”.

Play with different map projections. Consult Country Centered Map Projections and click on the country you are currently living in. Try different map projections to see how this changes the way the country is displayed. Think about why different map projections exist. What is their purpose?

To learn more about projections, you may continue reading the Wikipedia article.

You can also study the list of projections to familiarise yourself with the variety of existing projections.

There is a wide variety of methodological reflections concerning map analysis, usually referred to as “critical cartography”. The approach we should take to maps largely depends upon the specific type of cartographic material at hand and the research question. Despite the variety of analytical tools, many researchers prefer to apply comparative approaches.

We can start with basic questions such as: why does a certain map show a feature in a particular way, and why is this feature shown differently on another map? Step by step, we can go deeper into the details of the map and explore possible explanations for these differences.

Let us take the example of world maps. Observe the three maps below.

1. Map 24: Principal Routes of the World in Kaiseikwan’s Standard Atlas of Japan, 1925, Tōkyō Kaiseikan (Kaiseikan mohan Nihon chizu: Monbushō kenteizumi: shihan gakkō, chūgakkō, kōtō jogakkō chirikayō)

2. World Map in German School Atlas in Lange, Henry und Carl Diercke, Schulatlas (mit Karte zur Heimatkunde), Braunschweig [u.a.]: Westermann, [1932?]

3. Official National Atlas of India. Government of India, Ministry of Education and Scientific Research (Hg.): National Atlas of India (preliminary Edition), ed. by. S. P. Chatterjee, Calcutta/ Dehradun 1957

Apply source criticism to the maps with the help of the key questions introduced above: Who produced the map? When was it created? What is the content of the map? How is the map content presented? Why was the map created? Who was the map aimed at?

After this first step, go deeper into cartographic details to analyse the particular purposes the map was meant to achieve, and examine possible intentions of the map creators. For the time being, you can focus on the questions below:

• Which continent does each map depict at its centre? Did the cartographers choose different map projections, and if so, why?

Focusing on the details of maps and tackling comparative questions may prove rather difficult as we do not necessarily have the relevant background material to give us an insight into the production process and the cartographer’s decisions. So we should proceed carefully when starting our interpretation and elaborating on explanations regarding the appearance and content of maps. When analysing a map, we should bear in mind that the authors, cartographers and editors of maps have to make many decisions in the course of map production, whether implicit or explicit, conscious or unconscious. Map makers select particular features from the wealth of spatial information available, and focus on a few features they want to visualise. Specific cartographic “languages” and styles (symbols, colours etc.) have developed over centuries. Since the 19th century, increasing international exchanges among cartographers and editors have led to various conventions regarding map design, such as placing the geographic north at the top of the map.

Now study two maps of the Mediterranean and note your observations on the basis of what you have learned above.

Map 1: “Petite carte d’Orient et de la Méditerranée” (1840), held by: Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Cartes et plans, GE DL 1840-261. (The image is used courtesy of the holding institution)

Map 2: “Mediterranean without Borders” (2011) by the artist Sabine Réthoré, displayed in the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée and freely available on the website of the artist.

Source: http://sabine-rethore.net/fr/cartes/mediterraneesans.html

Reflect on how the production of maps is based on a chain of decisions and therefore filters spatial reality. It is likely that the cartographer has applied particular techniques to support a specific perception of their map and counter unwanted interpretations. Maps are a way of categorising, systematising, levelling and stereotyping spatial features and individual characteristics of the objects depicted in them.

By Peter Haslinger

Since the 19th century, the rise of nationalism in Europe and worldwide has highlighted the importance of population: ethnicity, language and religion have been central to political tensions over perceived majorities and minorities and contested borders. Regular censuses conducted at national level have provided a statistical basis for measuring the use of language, demographic development, etc. over a longer period. Political debates have been reflected in cartographic production and census data have been used to depict both populations and national(istic) arguments.

You will work with two maps that were created in the context of World War One and used respectively by the Polish and Hungarian delegations during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919-1920 to legitimise national territorial claims. These examples give an insight into aspects of cartographic debates about populations at the time. Both map authors were founding fathers of geography in their respective countries.

Contextual information and maps

Polish cartographer Eugeniusz Romer (1871-1954) produced maps during World War One. In the aftermath of the war, these maps served as cartographic templates for the Polish delegation’s maps at the Paris Peace Conference (published as Polski Atlas Kongresowy in 1921). Romer’s credibility among international geographers and his personal friendships with some experts on the side of the Allied Powers, especially the highly influential American expert Isaiah Bowman, increased the authoritative nature of the maps presented by the Polish delegation to the decision-makers. In a map entitled “The political and ethnographical territory of Poland (1772)”, Romer supports a maximalist approach to Polish territorial claims by combining the territory of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (“Poland” in its borders prior to the First Partition of 1772) with additional areas in the west containing some Polish populations. We can see the strategy of creating a normative connection between language use and political boundaries.

Figure : Chodkiewicz, Bronisław, Bronisław Gubrynowicz, Adolf Holzhausen, Karol Nitsch, Jacek Nowak, Eugeniusz Romer, Jacek Rutkowski, Władysław Semkowicz, Władysław Szafer and Stanisław Wiktor Weigner, eds. 1916. Geograficzno-statystyczny atlas Polski [1-3]. (Geographical and Statistical Atlas of Poland). Gebethner i Wolff. PAN Kórnik Library, Kórnik, Poland. Public domain. URL

Hungarian politician Pál Teleki (1879-1941), who served as Prime Minister on two occasions, became the leading geographer and academic mastermind of Hungarian cartography and geopolitics. Teleki’s extensive language skills had helped establish his international reputation before the war (he spoke German, French and English, as well as some Dutch, Italian and Romanian). During the peace negotiations between Hungary and the Allied Powers at Trianon, the official Hungarian delegation promoted the idea that Hungary was one of the most striking morphological units on the physical map of Europe, with the practically uninhabited belt of the Carpathians surrounding most of the country and creating a natural barrier. In preparation for the peace talks he drafted the famous “carte rouge” as early as December 1918. This map was now used alongside the Hungarian memoranda in order to retain as much territory as possible for Hungary, and was published in several editions even after the Treaty of Trianon was signed on 4 June 1920. Teleki’s method of not including areas that were less populated, and his choice of colours (red for Hungarian, pale pink for Romanian), over-emphasised the Hungarian-speaking minority population in Transylvania at the expense of the Romanian-speaking majority.

Figure : Paul Teleki, Magyarorzság néprajzi térképe a népsűrűség alapján (Ethnographic map of Hungary based on population density), Den Haag: Lith. J. Smulders and Co., 1919. HM Military History Institute and Museum, Budapest, Hungary. Image reproduced courtesy of the content provider. URL

Check the maps and the contextual information provided above. If you feel you need further information, you can also conduct some research on the web. Then answer the following questions:

Perspective and context of creation

• Who made the map? For whom? When?

Choices

• What exactly is shown on the map?
• What national perspectives are presented?
• Representation strategies:
  • What kind of borders do you see?
  • What do the differently coloured territories stand for?
  • What is the statistical basis for this map?
  • What does the colour red stand for and what visual effect is it supposed to achieve?
  • How should the white areas on the map be interpreted?

Audience and purpose

• What does the map tell us about the political intention of its author through the choice of map section and the drawn boundaries?

Now write a short paragraph to summarize your findings:

• What stories do the maps tell?

After their actual use, these maps were archived, and more recently they were digitised. Conduct your own research on the web about both maps, using the title of each as your search query.

• Which libraries digitised the maps and made them available, in which countries?
• Based on your findings, what does this tell us on the cultural heritagisation of these maps?

By Christian Lotz

Learning outcome - initiation to maps as data visualisations

Maps can be an impressive tool for visualising power. Political entities – kingdoms, nation states and empires – have used them to mark borders, outline territorial ambitions or demonstrate influence. Cartographers have combined data selection with visualisation techniques to highlight power and influence and to make arguments. The following example uses two maps of the world which show the influence of the British Empire during the 1920s and 1930s from different points of view.

Contextual information and maps

This map is part of the “Chambers of Commerce Atlas”, published in London in 1928. The Chambers of Commerce are one of the main British institutions for facilitating worldwide trade. The Atlas was aimed at a British audience, and more broadly any English-speaking readers interested in trade routes, as well as the spatial distribution of natural resources and commercial capacities. The “General Reference Map” uses the colour pink to indicate territories that are linked to the British Empire and the Commonwealth. This is an obvious (and colourful) technique to highlight British influence across the world. However, the map also conveys dominant cultural representations of an imperial power, which is obvious in the use of place names – for example Bombay (in India) and Constantinople (in Turkey), rather than Mumbaī and İstanbul. Although the former were the place names commonly in use in the English language for these two cities, and therefore familiar to a British audience, their use also suggests a world in which the United Kingdom is culturally, financially and politically a dominant power.

Figure : Alexander Radó, “International Movements of Capital”. In The Atlas of To-day and To-morrow. London, UK: Victor Gollanz, 1938. Public Domain.

The map “International Movements of Capital” is included in the “Atlas of To-day and To-morrow”, published by Alexander (Sándor) Radó, also in London, in 1938. The atlas outlines the cleavages caused by global conflicts in the early 20th century. Most of the maps in the atlas are in black and white, although some also include red. On the map, circles and arrows demonstrate the amount of capital flowing from major powers to other parts of the world. The visual strength of the map derives from the arrows and lines linking different parts of the world. Various interpretations are possible: Do the lines and arrows demonstrate the competition between the British Empire and the rising power of the United States of America? Or does the map allow for a visual comparison of investment strategies: British capital is invested overseas, while, for example, French capital mainly goes to Central and Eastern European countries? Or do these lines represent symbolic tentacles, reaching out to grab more and more parts of the world?

Look at the maps, bearing in mind the contextual information provided above. If you need further information about the context of creation, you can also do your own research online. The Wikipedia articles on the map creators can be useful to answer the questions below:

Wikipedia contributors, “British Chambers of Commerce”, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=British_Chambers_of_Commerce&oldid=1270196576 (accessed 17 February 2025).

Wikipedia contributors, “Alexander Radó”, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alexander_Rad%C3%B3&oldid=1262810919 (accessed 17 February 2025).

Then answer the following questions for each map:

Perspective and context of creation

• Who created the map? When? Where?

Audience and purpose

• For what purpose was the map created? For whom?

Choices

• What is shown? What is missing?
• Representation strategies
  • Use of colours
  • Use of symbols, if any: type, size…

By Sofia Papastamkou

The map by Radó presented in 2.d has a particular sense of movement which brings it closer to the contemporary dynamic of interactive visualisations based on the availability of digital data and dedicated software. However, we do not have direct access to the data the map creator used, as the technologies of his time did not make this possible – even presuming that he would have wanted to provide us with access to his dataset.

To further explore this dimension, take a look at the website Our World In Data. Consult the “About” page to find out about the aim of the initiative and the contributors.

Pick a map of your choice. Here we use the world map that presents the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita for the current year: GDP per capita.

• What types of visualisation do you have access to besides the map? Tip: use the table provided at the top of the map to navigate the different visualisations.
• Do you have access to the data the map creator(s) worked with?
• Can you trace the origin of the data? Can you contextualise the visualisations by applying source criticism?
• What other elements and information do you find interesting?

National Archives. “Analyze a Map”. 15 August 2016. https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/worksheets/analyze-a-map-intermediate.

Górny, Maciej. Drawing fatherlands. Geographers and borders in inter-war Europe. Leiden: Brill 2022

Seegle, Steven. Map men. Transnational lives and deaths of geographers in the making of Eastern Europe. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press 2018

Haslinger, Peter. National geopolitics in Habsburg Central Europe. Imperial and post-imperial perspectives on Hungary and Poland, 1890-1930. In: Jan Arend (ed.): Science and Empire in Eastern Europe. Imperial Russia and the Habsburg Monarchy in the 19th Century. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020: 205-236

Osowska, Anna, and Dariusz Przybytek. “Thematic maps in Eugeniusz Romer’s Geographical and Statistical Atlas of Poland from 1916 – the historical and methodological perspective (on the 100-year anniversary of the publication)”. Polish Cartographical Review Sciendo, 48, no. 2 (2016): 77-86. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/pcr-2016-0007

By Tabitha Redepenning

Mapping has always been particularly important in warfare because of the need to identify weak points and crucial targets and to secure one’s own assets. On maps for public use, information of military interest such as fortifications, garrisons and armament factories often remains invisible, at best only outlined in vague shapes or blank spaces. This is yet another demonstration of the potentially deceptive selection process in representations on maps. With World War Two, a new and powerful tool for surveying became widespread: aerial photography. Military technology enabled new ways of scouting the Earth’s surface. During World War Two, all major belligerent powers pursued aerial reconnaissance, including Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Today, archives and libraries in many countries hold aerial photography, such as the National Collection of Aerial Photography (NCAP) in the UK, the National Archives in the USA and the Bundesarchiv in Germany.

Figure . Detail of Topografische Karte 1:25000, ed. by Reichsamt für Landesaufnahme, sheet No. 4969 Nädlingen, 1942. Source: Herder Institute

The first illustration is a detail of the standard German topographic map (1:25000) showing the surroundings of Markstädt and Fünfteichen in Silesia, about 20km East of Breslau/Wrocław, dated 1942. Over the following years of the war, this map was not updated, although smaller-scale maps were published, such as the Karte des Deutschen Reiches (1:100000), map no. 104, in 1944.

Figure . Detail of Topografische Karte 1:100000, ed by Reichsamt für Landesaufnahme, sheet No. 104 Breslau, 1944. Source: Herder Institute

By the end of the war, when the Soviet Army approached German borders, the Deutsche Luftwaffe (German air force) had stepped up its reconnaissance flights to prepare its defence. The following aerial image was taken during flight 1308 on 18 September 1944.

Figure : Deutsche Luftwaffe (German air force) flight No. 1308, image No. 689, 18 September 1944. Source: Herder Institute

We can compare these different kinds of spatial representation and evaluate the content of the maps and the aerial image. To facilitate comparison, the aerial image should be rotated northwards and the maps should be adjusted so that they are on a similar scale.

Figure : Montage of aerial image (rotated Northwards) and 1:25000 map and 1:100000 map

Analysing the picture and comparing it with the topographic maps, the same settlements and the same converging train rails are recognisable. But there is more: the aerial image shows some huge buildings (A) as well as a regular structure of small buildings (B).

Comparing the topographic maps with the aerial photograph reveals some differences, while also showing the different states of knowledge of the various actors at a specific moment in time. It demonstrates the wide range of applications for aerial photography as a valuable supplement to topographic mapping. The subject-specific knowledge of historians is often crucial in integrating and assimilating all these different elements into the visualisation and representation of a place in time.

To collect more information about buildings and infrastructure, we can use the Wikipedia article on the history of Fünfteichen and Markstädt.

More information about the armaments factory near Jeltsch/Jelcz and its almost invisible remnants today is available in this article in Polish.

Now reflect on the following: What advantage does the topographic map still hold compared to an aerial photograph? Consider also the circumstances of aerial photography as a new technology from this period. Comparing different photographs with regard to their quality, the image section and their informative value as a standalone document will give you more insight. Additionally, consider the conditions in which these photographs were taken during wartime, as well as the different strategies used by each side to hide important information. You may use the further reading suggestions provided below.

By Christian Lotz

Huge numbers of maps are produced in times of war. While military maps are kept secret because they depict points of strategic interest, many maps are also produced for public use to inform about the war (advancement of troops, loss of territory, etc.) or as means of propaganda to promote one particular view of the war over another. Public maps about warfare are a highly sensitive source for historiography, since wars are fought not only with weapons but also with images. So we should pay particular attention to questions like who provided information and data to be shown on the maps, and what was the particular purpose in producing such maps for the public.

In this part of the lesson, we compare maps from World War One and maps of the Russia-Ukraine war since 2022. During World War One, public maps about the war were mainly published in newspapers and periodicals. Most of these maps had a relatively small scale, often showing a rough sketch of the front line between two countries at a scale between 1:1 million and 1:5 million. If a part of the front line was of particular interest, some publishers added medium-scale maps, for example showing Verdun and its surroundings on the French-German front.

Figure : Verein für Kriegshilfe: Map of the Western front in February 1915

These kinds of small-scale public maps were issued weekly. The regular frequency of publication made them an important medium of information and propaganda: they showed the progress or lack of progress of front lines, informed readers at least roughly about areas at risk of being directly affected by the war, and demonstrated territorial gains and losses. However, the small-scale maps did not give readers a real idea of the situation along the front line. The armies kept large-scale maps showing trenches and fortified places secret, because publicly known details would allow the enemy to direct its attacks with greater precision.

Figure : Die militärischen Ereignisse im Völkerkrieg 1914-15. In wöchentlichen Karten mit Chronik zu dauernder Erinnerung. Published by Vereinigung für Private Kriegshilfe, Munich, 1914-15. Map no. 19: Die militärischen Ereignisse vom 24. Januar bis 1. Februar 1915, Westlicher Kriegsschauplatz

Figure : detail of the previous map

A couple of decades after a war is over, archives in many countries open these kinds of large-scale maps to public access. Such maps were usually printed by army map services. Surveying officers at the front line would observe the situation and draw and annotate maps by hand to provide a reliable image of the situation. The question “What does the map show us?” may lead us to a variety of answers: of course, the topography of the hills and valleys south of Verdun as well as the dense network of trenches are visible on the map. In addition, it served as a representation of static warfare (armies on both sides fighting over just a few hundred metres to capture the opposite trench) and also as a representation of a huge graveyard for the thousands of soldiers who died in these fields.

Today, several small-scale maps about ongoing wars in the world, for example the war between Russia and Ukraine that began in 2022, continue to be printed in newspapers and periodicals, and there are also many more maps online at both small and large scales. These digital maps are either static images or dynamic web map services that provide specific data and illustrate changes over time (the latter are based on the use of geographic information systems, which we will see in more detail in assignment 4). Prominent examples of web map services documenting the Russia-Ukraine war are the LiveUAmap, the ACLEDdata map or the web map of the [Neue Zürcher Zeitung](https://www.nzz.ch/english/ukraine-war-interactive-map-of-the-current-front-line-ld.1688087].

Figure :Screenshot of Ukraine on LiveUAmap on 7 June 2023 URL: https://liveuamap.com/en/time/07.06.2023 Images reproduced for the purpose of this lesson in accordance with terms of use.

These web map services illustrating the Russia-Ukraine war offer multi-scale maps. At small scales they provide an overview, while at larger scales users can zoom in to the front line in a particular region. The content of the maps is derived from various sources, such as messenger services, military press briefings, etc. Although we can zoom in to a large-scale map, and although we can find detailed information about the front line, most maps do not provide data about the positions of fortified places or military installations on the Ukrainian side.

Now it’s over to you: apply the basic principles of source criticism in all three cases below (refer to the Methodology section).

First, compare maps from World War One and the Russia-Ukraine war. Are you able to identify the context of creation, the intention of the maps and the sources of information? What do you notice about the creators? Are there any significant differences, and if so, why?

Second, focus on the online maps about the Russia-Ukraine war. Explore and compare maps provided by LiveUAmap and the Institute for the Study of War.

• Apply source criticism (use the questions provided in the Methodology section)
• Analyse any differences you identify between them.

Finally, choose at least two web map services documenting conflicts and wars in the world. You may use some of those mentioned above or do some research on the web to find services you are particularly interested in. If you are short of ideas, we provide some references in the reading suggestions below. Once your choice is made:

• Apply source criticism as previously
• Explore additional sources of information that can be combined with the maps: instant messaging services, (social) media, etc.
• Can you identify government and non-government institutions that provide details about events of war shown on the map?
• Is there more information about one side of the front than the other? If so, why?

Aerial photography

A prisoner-focused article highlighting the importance of aerial photography for reconstructing memory:

“Fünfteichen camp – Overview”. Holocaust Matters. Resource for Holocaust Education. 18 May 2017. Overview courtesy of The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CAMPS AND GHETTOS, 1933–1945. https://www.holocaustmatters.org/fnfteichen-camp-overview/

Conflict related web map services

War Watch

War Mapper

By Eliane Schmid

To understand what layered geographic information can look like, access the spatio-temporal map created for the online exhibition “World War II Luxembourg”.

• First, explore the maps. There are four different maps that you can choose from.
• Click on them one by one and notice how the same space is represented differently each time.
• Describe briefly what each layer represents.
• Zoom in and out to see which layers have limits and which ones extend far beyond the borders of Luxembourg, or even Europe. Why is that?
• Study the most colourful map carefully:
  • What does it depict?
  • How does its appearance change when you change the map layer lying underneath it?
  • Why is it projected at an angle?

Turning these layers on and off is a simple yet pertinent example of GIS. These four different maps are four different layers of information that we can call upon and rearrange. They are four different ways of visualising spatial data.

Now compare this to your everyday use of Google Maps and the different functions it offers. Had you ever thought about these functions as an act of activating and deactivating layers of information? Play around with Google Maps, or any map provider of your choice, on your browser or smartphone and think about the information that can be revealed or hidden. Type different keyword searches, such as “pharmacy” or “railway station”, and think of these in terms of information layers that are being turned on and off. You can also build your own layer of data to add to the map, guided by the exercise that follows.

By Werner Tschacher, Stefan Krebs

This assignment is based on a teaching dossier that was produced for the online exhibition “Minett Stories”, in connection with the research project “Remixing Industrial Pasts in the Digital Ages”, carried out with the support of Esch2022 asbl between 2019 and 2023 at the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH). The assignment can be adapted to other national/local contexts for which geospatial data are available.

Historical context: exploring place names in Southern Luxembourg

Landscape and place names play an important role as reference points for regional identity. The place names in the south of Luxembourg have changed several times in connection with the industrial transformation of the landscape. Before industrialisation, the entire southern region in Luxembourg was part of a larger region known traditionally as “Gutland” because of its fertile soil. When the southern region entered the industrial age in 1850, the landscape changed first, and then the names. As iron ore mining intensified, industrial open-cast mining and quarrying underground brought the colour of the red-brown minette ore to the surface at more and more points in the green landscape.

Industrialisation tore the land up, deforesting areas so that production sites could be built on them. Contemporary sources testify that new regional names – “Minett” and “Rote Erde” (Red Earth) – were created after the mid-19th century to reflect the mining activities of extracting the minette ore. The French word “minette” literally means small mine or small vein, given the low iron content of the ore. Thus, [the naming (and renaming) of the area currently known as the Minett reflected the industrial development of the region(https://minett-stories.lu/en/story/naming-and-renaming-of-the-luxembourg-southern-region).

Let us examine the traces of this historical heritage in Luxembourg’s second largest urban area, Esch-sur-Alzette. This was the traditional centre of the Minett region, often referred to as the “Métropole du fer” (iron metropolis) or “rote Stadt” (red town) in the 20th century.

Instructions

For this exercise, you will use Luxembourg’s national official geoportal, a government-developed web portal aimed at collecting, describing and presenting geospatial data. Geoportals are essential resources for finding good quality geospatial data – imagine them as libraries that enable you to work with this kind of data.

Go to the street name directory for Esch-sur-Alzette to access a comprehensive list of all of the town’s street names. Then look for those that are associated with industry – there are several such names, some adopting general terms (e.g. Rue de l’Acier, Rue de l’Industrie, Rue de l’Usine) and some referencing former steelworks and mines (e.g. An der Schmelz, Avenue des Hauts-Fourneaux, Ennert den Héichiewen, Rue des Mines), industrial professions (e.g. Avenue des Sidérurgistes, Rue des Fondeurs, Rue des Mineurs) and the names of inventors and industrialists (e.g. Rue Henry Bessemer, Place Norbert Metz, Rue Émile Mayrisch, Rue Léon Metz, Rue Sidney Thomas). All these names refer to the multiple facets of the industrial history of the Minett region and its centre, Esch-sur-Alzette. The same applies to other towns and locations in the southern region such as Pétange, Differdange, Dudelange, Bettembourg and Rumelange.

Make a list of the street names you found and reflect on them (or discuss the names if you are working in groups). Try to establish a typology that groups these names into categories (names of places, people, professions, etc.).

Tip: you can compare the list you established with our non-exhaustive list

Do some research online to collect information and photos about the different street names. Prepare short information files about each street name. For example, for a person you can note their dates of birth and death, their profession, their link to the town’s industrial past and any other information you find relevant. For a place named after a profession, you might like to look for the origins of the name, how the professional activity changed over time, and any traces of the activity in the street. If you wish to dig deeper, you may conduct research in the town archives or interview people.

Finally, you can do some field work: visit the streets you found and familiarise yourself with the location and surroundings. You can check if there are any visible traces associating the streets with the historical past after which they were named: architecture, monuments, relics of past activities, etc. If you find any, take photos on your phone, or if not take photos of the street signs.

Now you have enough information to link to geospatial data and create your own map! You could simply create a map by tagging the names of the streets related to the industrial past of Esch-sur-Alzette. Or you could go a step further and integrate the photos you took during your field work. If you do this, you will have created a new layer that you can integrate into a user-friendly service like Google Maps or an open source service like uMap.

To use Google Maps, please read the instructions available in: Clifford, Jim, Josh MacFadyen, and Daniel Macfarlane. “Intro to Google Maps and Google Earth”. Programming Historian 2 (2013), https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0028

To use uMap, please follow the instructions available in this tutorial.

If you publish your map, please contact us so that we can include the link in this lesson!

By Christian Lotz

This assignment does not provide an introduction to GIS and mapping software, as such resources are already available online (see reading suggestions below). Instead, it focuses on how historians can critically evaluate available GIS datasets and the maps created based on such data.

Simply put, GIS data, known as geopackages, are a combination of folders containing spatial data, attribute data and metadata. Spatial data are necessary to create the representation of the space the map focuses on, whereas attribute data serve to describe the space with a variety of features, depending the point of view/intention of the map. These data create the layers of the map. Finally, the metadata provide descriptive and technical information about the two other types of data. Once imported into a GIS application, these data serve to create the layers of the map that we previously imagined as sheets of different information attached to a map.

GIS data are available in various repositories, such as Harvard-GIS, which specialises in geospatial data. They can also be available in scientific repositories not necessarily specialising in geospatial data, or centralised repositories where governments enable open datasets to be published. Historians and other users can download geopackages from these repositories to use with the software of their choice, or they can create and contribute their own datasets.

Regarding digital source criticism, we should focus on the following questions:

• What is the origin of the data used to create the dataset?
• How did the creators of the dataset transform the original information into data? Which categories did the creators of the dataset prioritise when transforming the information into data?
• What are the technical components and environment that may have had an impact on the creation of the dataset?

Good quality metadata, and the existence of detailed documentation, are crucial elements for evaluating datasets. Sometimes, information about datasets is provided in specific scholarly publications known as data papers (peer-reviewed articles describing a dataset).

Let’s take a closer look at two datasets imported and opened with QGIS software, displayed in the two screenshots below.

The screenshot below (figure ) shows a dataset about the Kingdom of Poland as part of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 19th century. The dataset comes from the Imperiia Project run by researcher Kelly O’Neill at Harvard University, which created datasets about the administrative borders of the Russian Empire. The authors of the dataset describe the preparation of data and the sources from which they extracted the information about borders. For each administrative entity, its name is given in Russian (both in Cyrillic and in a Latin transliteration).

Figure : Visualisation of a historical dataset, Imperiia Project, in QGIS – the Kingdom of Poland as part of the Russian Empire in the 19th century.

Dataset reference: O’Neill, Kelly. 2016. “Administrative Boundaries of the Russian Empire (1820s): Provinces (Oblasti).” Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/doi:10.7910/DVN/5LUP5S.

The following screenshot shows a dataset about the border of the partitions of Poland. The dataset was created by Christopher Winters at the University of Chicago. Compared to the previous dataset, the amount of additional information is very different. While the Imperiia Project provides sources for the dataset, there are no sources given in Winters’ dataset. The absence of sources does not mean that the dataset is wrong or that the depicted line of the border is not correct. However, from a historian’s perspective, it is far more difficult to deal with material that does not provide any information about its origin.

Figure : Visualisation of Polish historical boundaries based on datasets of historian Christopher Winters, obtained in QGIS – the Kingdom of Poland as part of the Russian Empire in the 19th century.

Dataset reference: Brown, Sam. n.d. “Polish historical boundaries”. Includes shapefiles showing the boundaries of Poland at the time of the Third Partition; the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807; the Kingdom of Poland under the Czars; and Interwar Poland; also województwa, 1945-1968. Library of the University of Chicago. https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/collections/maps/uofcgis.html

Browse the resources available on the website The Historical GIS Research Network. Explore available datasets and compare them. In particular, look for information about the origin of the data, the design and creation of the data, and the technical environment in which the dataset was created.

On GIS historical criticism

Wilm, Julius (April 13, 2023). Layering in GIS as a Method of Historical Deconstruction and Source Criticism. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. DOI: https://doi.org/10.58079/ut6o Retrieved 28 May 2025

Historical projects using GIS

American Panorama. An Atlas of United States History. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/

Land Acquisition and Dispossession. Mapping the Homestead Act, 1863-1912. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/homesteading/map/

Julius Wilm, Robert K. Nelson, and Justin Madron, “Homesteading,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed April 7, 2026, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/homesteading/

Julius Wilm. Land Acquisition and Marginalization in the US West and South, 1863-1934. History, GIS and US Studies website https://juliuswilm.com/index.html https://juliuswilm.com/projects.html

Yan Wu, Cameron Blevins, Steven Braun. Gossamer Network. Companion website to Cameron Blevins, Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West (Oxford University Press, 2021). https://gossamernetwork.com/

Case studies in historical research using GIS

Vieira Paulino, Joana. 2025. “Child Abandonment in 19th Century Lisbon: The Provenance and Distribution of Foundlings Through a GIS Lens”. European Journal of Geography 16 (1):s75-s89. https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.si.spat.hum.j.pau.75.89

Fretwell, Laura Brannan, and Eliane Schmid. 2025. “Layering Public Park Histories: Uncovering the Effects of Restoration Idea[l]s in Post-War Urban Spaces in Germany and the U.S.”. European Journal of Geography 16 (1):s30-s44. https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.si.spat.hum.l.bra.30.44

Watch:

The European public service channel Arte has a program called “Mapping the World”, where maps take center stage to explain geopolitical events, past and present. Scan through the episode that shows different ways data is visualized and mapped and ask yourself what kind of information these maps communicate and to what effect:

Mapping the World. Rising Sea Levels: A Global Issue (12min16)

In German Mit offenen Karten. Der Globale Anstieg des Meerespiegels

In French Quand la mer monte : un enjeu mondial | Le Dessous des cartes | ARTE

Educational resources to obtain technical skills on GIS Hafen, Konrad. QGIS Tutorial for Beginners. November 11, 2021 Available at: https://opensourceoptions.com/qgis-tutorial-for-beginners/

Geospatial School. QGIS for Beginners. YouTube Video. 26 January 2021. 50:40 minutes. https://youtu.be/Eg4_duqH5Q4

Watch the first 6 minutes of This Is Not an Atlas - A Documentary on Counter-Cartographies.

Then answer the following questions:

• Why should we rethink the trustworthiness of maps?
• What does it take to remove the “counter” in counter-cartography?
• Are the maps that you analysed in 1.a examples of cartography that need to be reassessed?

Explore the archived version of the website Remapping Zurich.

• What different kinds of mapping did this project engage with? Do they still count as maps? Why? Why not?
• What is the benefit of maps not being “scientific”? How can we play with different designs?
• Why are maps such powerful tools for communication? How can this be useful in historical analysis and dissemination?
• What is the value of thinking about space? How can it help us become conscious of different lived experiences – also in the past?

Draw two maps of your daily commute to school, university, work, a leisure activity or similar, by hand on a piece of paper or a tablet. One map should depict the path you take in the morning, on a warm and sunny day, when everything goes according to plan. The other map should illustrate your path home, when it is dark, rainy and cold and something does not go according to plan: there is a train strike, a traffic jam, your bike has a flat tyre, you need to pick up your child from pre-school earlier, you forget your keys, etc.

How do your maps differ depending on the time of day and the contextual circumstances? Are the two maps the same? Are some elements more prominent than others? Do you take a different path?

Think about how your personal background shapes the way you perceive space and how you consequently represent that perception on a piece of paper. Think about how your map design would change if you had a different personal background.

Zwer, Nepthys. “When Jacques Bertin anticipated radical cartography.” imago mundi, 31 October 2023. https://www.imagomundi.fr/article51.html

kollektiv orangotango+, ed. 2018. This Is Not an Atlas: A Global Collection of Counter-Cartographies. Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag. DOI.