Comparison Of California As Island to Google Earth

About: Map of California shown as an island ca 1650

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Seth says
Of course the whole idea

is that we can have a digital zoom into the history dimension via old maps.

Seth says

M 2006-06-17 06:13:50 [item 3740]

more proof! Some think California is an island full of kooks unto itself even today

Naah ... all of the kooks moved further west to Hawaii

only thing left are the jerks.

Seth says
This was a zoomed view proving that i could match some features, and perhaps names, fairly reliably. What is interesting is that the degrees latitude shown on this Harrisse map are not that far off of our current scheme, so matching latitudes gives us most of the clues we need for the match. I would like to match up as many points along the west coast as i can ...

Seth says
Of course anyone can help. Just provide longitude, latitude, time of map, and identity of map. This could be more fun than Treasure Hunters ... and you end up with digital zoom.

Mark de LA says
I like this picture of Indonesia from Google Earth: It shows clockwise from 11 - Taiwan, 12 - Phillippines 3-Borneo, 4-5 Australia, 4-8 the ring of fire - volcanoes - includes Djakarta, Singapore & Malaysia, 8-periphery = India, 9-(Indo-China) Vietnam, Thailand etc, (Just at 12 above the picture is Korea & Japan. It's a different view of the World quite lush with resources and sea commerce - Once presumably called the East Indies. I get a different perception of the strategic importance of this part of the Earth by looking at this area this way. The larger picture I turned into a JPEG . Google Earth is quite a fascinating piece of software. So far I haven't been able to get it to work in DIV-X mode.

Seth says
Yes, Google Earth is great! MSN Virtual Earth may be just as good, i don't know, haven't tried it. One thing i particularly liked with Google is that you can rotate the map to almost any angle you want. I found that the shape of the coast fitted better when the map was rotated more to how one would look at the coast from the poop deck of a tall ship. What is less clear about these products is how you put your own points on them such that others can see them ... i would like to see some kind of a viable sharing protocol emerge ... something along the lines of del.icio.us ... something based upon tags. I should be able to subscribe to a renton and instantly see a bunch of points emerge.

BTW, to do the digital zoom into the history dimension, in addition to the elements i mention above, you also need (*) degree of zoom, (*) maybe angle of orientation, and (*) the pictures (prolly jpeg) with the points designated. Notice that we do have a tag room for such a project now ... digital zoom. But as with all of these kind of thing, if nobody else is interested, it prolly will not happen

Seth says

You can also do digital zoom with people. Any thing that maintains it's identity through time can be used for historical digital zoom.

... see Time and Again at the Smithsonian.

Seth says

source: my comment on dog or higher
I agree, the new mapping is exciting. We are blue-skying a new concept that, for lack of a better term, i'm calling it digital zoom. I'm thinking that there is a very practical way to zoom into history. Take a look at it in it's infancy ... let me know what you think. It seems to me that the database for this could grow just like Wikipedia ... and the user interface ... well some smart fellow will figure that out.

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Comparison Of California As Island to Google Earth

About: Map of California shown as an island ca 1650

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