France, Georectified

For this assignment, I georectified a map of France. I have a limited experience with GIS, so I have done some georeferencing and some geocoding, meaning that this experience did not change my understanding at all, though this site was easy to use and could create any level of accuracy you may desire.

Based on the This Map page, it appears that the map created can be accessed in a number of ways. It can be viewed on the website, as an iiif file, as a GeoTIFF file, and through ArcGIS and QGIS.

A georectified map can be really useful in combining spatial and temporal aspects of a project. If you have a historical map with different boundaries than what exist now, like on my map of France, you can match up where current and historic boundaries match and where they differ. For this map, next steps could include analysing where the boundaries differ and why, perhaps with the use of historical records, now that these maps are lined up. My georectifying was not perfect, but paying more careful attention could enable a greater degree of accuracy. However, my map was accurate enough to tell that the northeastern border, where Moselle and Bas-Rhin are, does not match between the historic and the current maps.

Georeferencing can get difficult when using older, less reliable maps. Places had different names, now nonexistent places existed, current places now didn’t exist, and so on. You have to really know what you’re looking at to georeference certain maps, so it is not applicable for every situation or every map.

2 Comments

  1. I like how you did the screenshots/captions in this post — it looks very professional and sleek.

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