Monday, April 24, 2023

The Game of the World

Le Jeu du Monde is a French board game, which was released in 1645 by Pierre Du Val. It is one of the oldest known geography games. The purpose of this board game is to progress from the world's poles to the center of the world (France).

Players take it in turn to roll two dice and move forward based on the number rolled. Each position on the board is one country. The first countries as you progress from the poles are in America. You then progress through the countries of Africa, then the countries of Asia and finally through the countries of Europe. The winner is the player who reaches France first.

You can explore an interactive version of the map on the David Rumsey Map Collection. I have also used ADNO to create another interactive version of the map with English translations of the rules and explanations.

ADNO is a fantastic new tool for editing and sharing stories using IIIF images. If you can get a IIIF manifest for a historical map (or any other image) you can easily use ADNO to create a presentation of the map. ADNO is incredibly easy to use (for example I created my Le Jeu du Monde example in about one hour).

Many museums, libraries and the David Rumsey Map Collection provide IIIF manifests for their images of vintage historical maps. Using ADNO you can now create interactive presentations or story maps from thousands of vintage maps, paintings and many other types of online image.

If you want to create a IIIF powered interactive vintage map with one of the many popular JavaScript mapping libraries then you might want to use my own Leaflet-IIIF-GeoJSON mapping tool. This tool is fairly similar to ADNO. It allows you to upload and annotate a IIIF manifest. My tool however allows you to save your annotations as a geoJSON file. This file can then be used with any mapping library which supports GeoJSON and IIIF.

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