Flea Market Mapping

At Where 2.0 Michal Migursli, of Stamen Design, gave a great presentation on a personal project of his he calls Flea Market Mapping. Michal describes Flea Market Mapping as 'finding old maps, scanning them, creating map tiles from them and putting them online'.

You can view the presentation in the video below:



You can see Michal's own work in putting historical maps online at Old Oakland, a website that displays historical maps of Oakland in conjunction with Open Street Maps of the same location.

Get Lat Lon

One of the tools that Michal uses in putting his historical maps online is Get Lat Lon. Get Lat Lon is a tool built on top of the Google Maps API, that lets you find the latitude and longitude of any point on a map.

MapTiler

Another tool that Michal uses in creating his online historical maps is MapTiler, a map tile cutter. MapTiler is a map overlay generator for Google Maps and Google Earth. MapTiler generates map tiles from any image which you can then overlay on top of Google Maps.

MapTiler has a number of example maps created using its image cutter that shows various historical maps overlayed on Google Maps.

Historical Maps Online
During the presentation Michal looked at some of the other websites that are displaying historical maps online using modern map API's.

Some of these websites, such at Cartifact (LA and New York) and HyperCities (Berlin, New York, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv) have been featured on Google Maps Mania in recent weeks. Michal also reviewed Old Map App, a soon to be released application for the iPhone that lets you view New York City maps from the 17th to 19th centuries on your mobile.

Living New Deal

Another site reviewed in the presentation is Living New Deal, a collaborative effort to identify, map, interpret, and commemorate the public works legacy of the New Deal. The site has a Google Maps mashup that lets users find New Deal projects directly from a Google Map of California.

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