Diverse Uses of Historical Cartography : From Urban Analysis to the Educational Tool

Abstract

The research project lures attention to historical cartography as the fundamental material that needs to be collected, analysed, understood and used in the preservation management projects for enhancing widespread heritage. In a search for a methodological approach to understanding historical cartography, the study will begin with a map collection of various scales, periods and themes, to be analysed and compared inside the same coordinate system. Researchers are interested in developing an exact methodology for understanding and usability of historical cartography is raising. Nonetheless, there is a gap in connecting the analysis of historical maps with their use in preservation projects. The imposed question "what is a map?" is very complex and depends on many factors. Since the maps are present in various spheres of studies, to get the right image of what a map can represent and closely defining what a map is, one should examine different stands. Collecting and understanding the historical cartography with the developed methodology will lead to the part of digital humanities that concern managing metadata of historical document, georeferencing and digitalizing maps in the geographic information systems (GIS) respecting the standards of European Union (Europeana 2018). This project presents ways in which digitalization and systematization of these maps can foster public and professional engagement with heritage (Garcıa-Esparza et al., 2020), contributing to the UNESCO/UBC Vancouver declaration (2012) that points out the importance of digitalization of historical documents along with intangible qualities of urban spaces.