9 ms·

Using QGIS to apply a 1777 style to today's OpenStreetMap data

521 points by thibautg 4y ago

marklit 4y ago
Just this morning I finished watching a tutorial on setting up qgis, installing plugins and building a multi-layer map of Mumbai. Very much recommended for anyone looking into GIS https://youtu.be/jgbTosOPU-U https://youtu.be/jgbTosOPU-U
Aeolun 4y ago
It’s crazy to see how much has remained the same, even if so many new things were added. Looks like pretty much all the buildings that existed in 1777 still exist today. Even crazier to think that at the time the original map was made, pretty much all cities in the US didn’t even exist yet.
- hinoki 4y ago
  The Measure Of All Things is a book about the effort to measure the circumference of the earth to establish the length of the metre, about twenty years after these maps were made. The book goes into a bit of the technology used to reduce errors. But on further reading, it looks like there was an advance in theodolite design between when these maps were published and the survey for the metre. Wikipedia provides a good rabbit hole. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/847635.The_Measure_of_All_Things https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/847635.The_Measure_of_Al... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite
- HeckFeck 4y ago
  I purchased a 350 year old roadmap for my locality. It was still usable. The main roads, town placements and landscape features don't shift much!
robbedpeter 4y ago
Well done! This is a beautiful tribute.
pachico 4y ago
I've always been fascinated by old cartography. How did they even have such precision? Which tools did they have? And how did they store the information?
- gelatocar 4y ago
  just in case you haven't already seen it, David Rumsey's website is the most amazing collection of historical maps. https://www.davidrumsey.com/ https://www.davidrumsey.com/
  - bjarneh 4y ago
    Superb website, very cool!
  - pbowyer 4y ago
    Also https://maps.nls.uk/ https://maps.nls.uk/ is a great place to explore old maps
  - m_eiman 4y ago
    The Swedish government has about a million (literally!) historical maps available online, unfortunately it seems the interface is only in Swedish… https://historiskakartor.lantmateriet.se/ https://historiskakartor.lantmateriet.se/ Here's an example, a regional map from 1654 including Gothenburg: https://historiskakartor.lantmateriet.se/hk/viewer/internal/O12/4c4d535f4f3132/lms2/LMS/H%C3%A4radskarta/H%C3%A4radskarta https://historiskakartor.lantmateriet.se/hk/viewer/internal/...
  - pachico 4y ago
    No, I wasn't aware of that, thanks! I can really see how you can get hooked by something like this.
- stop50 4y ago
  they usually used triangulation, the same as today. they select an line as the startimg point and measure it exactly as possible(doesn't need to be long) and then you can calculate the rest with the measured angles of the area you want to measure. The rest is replicating it on paper with the required factor.
WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
The old maps had way better contrast, it seems.
- ktpsns 4y ago
  Modern Google/Apple maps are incredibly low contrast and I don't know why. Seems like they want to have streets and land stand back to make room for features such as pin locations, buisness markings (advertising) or dedicated layers such as traffic. I really don't get it. Here in Germany, in the last century, "road atlases" were a thing, big maps with great overview and detail maps which were basically at maximum contrast. For examples, see for instance https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=autokarte+deutschland&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=autokarte+deutschland&iax=i... It seems that OSM (OpenStreetMaps) gets this "more right" in some respect, but still it is not the same. Why? Too little confidence of the map makers to highlight the correct things?
  - tuyiown 4y ago
    One explanation would be that roads are not the useful information on modern map, you search for you POI or address, and then query an itinerary, and then you have a very contrasty road, the one you need. I suspect just looking at maps to find your way is a more and more cornered case.
    - pieno 4y ago
      This was indeed a very deliberate choice by Google, and they have been blogging about it since at least 2011[0]. There are quite some blog posts by Google and others discussing the evolution in online maps from the high contrast design focused on roads and cities, to more “fluid” designs where there is a bit more room to show buildings, forests, waterways and other landmarks that are more suited for exploration rather than navigation. [0] https://maps.googleblog.com/2011/07/evolving-look-of-google-maps-redux.html https://maps.googleblog.com/2011/07/evolving-look-of-google-...
      - iggldiggl 4y ago
hjjjjjje 4y ago
Dragging the sliders doesn't work when viewing on a mobile device.
- tacker2000 4y ago
  Works fine on my iphone 12 with ios 14.5.1
  - dspillett 4y ago
    Extra anecdata in case the creator is reading: sliders failed for me on Android Chrome this morning. I made no effort to check if this was due to a script failing to load or some other bug.
- gnfargbl 4y ago
  Same here, on Android Chrome. The JS script that the author is using relies on listening to both mousedown and touchstart events, etc. It isn't clear to me why Android has a problem with that, but I wonder if switching to listening only for pointer events [1] would fix things. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_events https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_eve...
qwertox 4y ago
It's interesting to see how segmented Antwerpen was back in 1777, what the author describes as hedges. These were usually the result of inheritance, when the land of one owner got split into pieces and each child then got one piece. They got smaller and smaller. I didn't think that this was already so extreme in 1777, but comparing it to the other maps, only Antwerpen and Brugge seem to be affected.
ssl232 4y ago
I dabbled in web-based mapping a couple years ago and found the tech stack to be really quite polished. Starting from a database of features from e.g. OpenStreetMap hosted in a Postgres-based PostGIS map server, and geographical boundaries via special shape files, you can write XML files representing the features you wish to see on each layer of the map (using SQL queries intended for PostGIS), and CSS-like style files representing how the features should look. You then set up a tile server (Apache or nginx or whatever) that generates tiles on demand and performs caching. Finally you use a JavaScript library to provide the "slippy map" that users can drag around. All of these layers of the tech stack have FOSS implementations; indeed most of the most widely used ones are FOSS. And then there's QGIS (also FOSS) to do most of this in a similar fashion, but offline. As merely a dabbler having a bit of fun, it's rather excellent I must say. It would be interesting to hear from anyone working in this field professionally as to how the FOSS tools measure up.
- mjbrownie 4y ago
  I've recently started working in this space. Loads of applications in research, Ag tech and environmental science and it's mostly using this tech stack (as well as GeoServer.) Definitely a nice change from my typical ecommerce/saas work. Working with some long term geo/surveyor types and they seem happy with the open source offerings.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- navbaker 4y ago
  QGIS is enormously valuable to those of us who need to do what I would non-authoritatively term "intermediate level geospatial analysis" in jobs that might not have geospatial analysis as part of the official job description, but don't have thousands of dollars available for the ludicrously expensive ArcGIS license.
  - starwind 4y ago
    I find the analysts still need ArcGIS, but on the geospatial software development side I've never run into something I couldn't use QGIS for
ageitgey 4y ago
As an avid fan of both old maps and QGIS, I just want to say that this is rad. Great job!
de_huit 4y ago
Nice project, and nice map! I did not know the Ferraris map, it is gorgeous. It would love to see a tile server of this map, preferably with a switch between the old and the new map. There is a 'time travel app' for Belgium [1] that includes the Ferraris map, and even older maps. It's a bit clunky, I like the Dutch topotijdreis (topo-time-travel) [2] a lot more, but it seems like the maps are not as old and not as good, I have to slide to 1898 to get a colored map of Amsterdam. [1] https://www.geopunt.be/kaart?app=Reis_door_de_tijd_app https://www.geopunt.be/kaart?app=Reis_door_de_tijd_app [2] https://www.topotijdreis.nl/kaart/1898/@122079,487387,9.49 https://www.topotijdreis.nl/kaart/1898/@122079,487387,9.49
- Aardwolf 4y ago
  This looks like a decent interactive Ferraris 1777 map: https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/belgium-1777/ https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/belgium-1777/
martin_a 4y ago
Side note: I love this style of "artwork". I also enjoy old books with paintings, older maps and whatnot and can look at them for hours. Maybe it's because I work in print media and know how fast and good modern tools are, so I can estimate (and value) how complicated it was to create all the graphics in former times. So: Great project to bring back the old style for modern data.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  There needs to be an icon set for gallows, gibbets, witch pyres, and dragon lairs and for coastal areas, sea monsters, whirlpools, mermaids, treasure, and of course an edge of the flat world.
  - martin_a 4y ago
    here be dragons!
RickyPointin 4y ago
janlaureys 4y ago
Cool, my street was already there in 1777. I absolute love this.
Bedon292 4y ago
Several of the original maps have some added topology on them, and I think a simplified hill shade could help pop the new ones in a similar manner. You can put it on with something like 90% transparency and get a bit of a pop to add more depth to it. I used to do this back when I still made paper maps, but it should work just as well in a totally digital format. Edit: On the github readme the author addresses this some. General elevation data isn't in OSM, so it was deemed out of scope for this project.
- wiredfool 4y ago
  The datasets are out there, and it's totally possible to do in QGIS. I've done it for Ireland so that I had hillshade on my personal cycling friendly maps. You just need a DEM model of the area of interest and run a hillshade operation on it. There are a couple of decent DEM datasets, SRTM and Gebco are two that I've run across.
starwind 4y ago
Is that how the colors of the maps actually looked in 1777? I always assumed that the colors had faded but I never really thought about it until now
markstos 4y ago
Love it!
yokto 4y ago
Nice! The rendering is more polished than what I did a few years ago in another similar project: apply CycleGAN style transfer on Google Maps / OpenStreetMap tiles to redraw them interactively as old hand-drawn maps https://github.com/nathanvogel/deepmaps https://github.com/nathanvogel/deepmaps
kerneis 4y ago
Mappy.cz has a layout to visualize CZ with a 19th century map: https://en.mapy.cz/19stoleti?x=13.9488027&y=50.4665536&z=12 https://en.mapy.cz/19stoleti?x=13.9488027&y=50.4665536&z=12 It would be awesome to have a similar style available there. I wonder how much work it would entail.

521 points by thibautg 4y ago

Just this morning I finished watching a tutorial on setting up qgis, installing plugins and building a multi-layer map of Mumbai. Very much recommended for anyone looking into GIS https://youtu.be/jgbTosOPU-U https://youtu.be/jgbTosOPU-U

Aeolun 4y ago

It’s crazy to see how much has remained the same, even if so many new things were added. Looks like pretty much all the buildings that existed in 1777 still exist today. Even crazier to think that at the time the original map was made, pretty much all cities in the US didn’t even exist yet.

hinoki 4y ago
The Measure Of All Things is a book about the effort to measure the circumference of the earth to establish the length of the metre, about twenty years after these maps were made. The book goes into a bit of the technology used to reduce errors. But on further reading, it looks like there was an advance in theodolite design between when these maps were published and the survey for the metre. Wikipedia provides a good rabbit hole. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/847635.The_Measure_of_All_Things https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/847635.The_Measure_of_Al... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite
HeckFeck 4y ago
I purchased a 350 year old roadmap for my locality. It was still usable. The main roads, town placements and landscape features don't shift much!

robbedpeter 4y ago

Well done! This is a beautiful tribute.

pachico 4y ago

I've always been fascinated by old cartography. How did they even have such precision? Which tools did they have? And how did they store the information?

gelatocar 4y ago
just in case you haven't already seen it, David Rumsey's website is the most amazing collection of historical maps. https://www.davidrumsey.com/ https://www.davidrumsey.com/
- bjarneh 4y ago
  Superb website, very cool!
- pbowyer 4y ago
  Also https://maps.nls.uk/ https://maps.nls.uk/ is a great place to explore old maps
- m_eiman 4y ago
  The Swedish government has about a million (literally!) historical maps available online, unfortunately it seems the interface is only in Swedish… https://historiskakartor.lantmateriet.se/ https://historiskakartor.lantmateriet.se/ Here's an example, a regional map from 1654 including Gothenburg: https://historiskakartor.lantmateriet.se/hk/viewer/internal/O12/4c4d535f4f3132/lms2/LMS/H%C3%A4radskarta/H%C3%A4radskarta https://historiskakartor.lantmateriet.se/hk/viewer/internal/...
- pachico 4y ago
  No, I wasn't aware of that, thanks! I can really see how you can get hooked by something like this.
stop50 4y ago
they usually used triangulation, the same as today. they select an line as the startimg point and measure it exactly as possible(doesn't need to be long) and then you can calculate the rest with the measured angles of the area you want to measure. The rest is replicating it on paper with the required factor.

WesolyKubeczek 4y ago

The old maps had way better contrast, it seems.

ktpsns 4y ago
Modern Google/Apple maps are incredibly low contrast and I don't know why. Seems like they want to have streets and land stand back to make room for features such as pin locations, buisness markings (advertising) or dedicated layers such as traffic. I really don't get it. Here in Germany, in the last century, "road atlases" were a thing, big maps with great overview and detail maps which were basically at maximum contrast. For examples, see for instance https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=autokarte+deutschland&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=autokarte+deutschland&iax=i... It seems that OSM (OpenStreetMaps) gets this "more right" in some respect, but still it is not the same. Why? Too little confidence of the map makers to highlight the correct things?
- tuyiown 4y ago
  One explanation would be that roads are not the useful information on modern map, you search for you POI or address, and then query an itinerary, and then you have a very contrasty road, the one you need. I suspect just looking at maps to find your way is a more and more cornered case.
  - pieno 4y ago
    This was indeed a very deliberate choice by Google, and they have been blogging about it since at least 2011[0]. There are quite some blog posts by Google and others discussing the evolution in online maps from the high contrast design focused on roads and cities, to more “fluid” designs where there is a bit more room to show buildings, forests, waterways and other landmarks that are more suited for exploration rather than navigation. [0] https://maps.googleblog.com/2011/07/evolving-look-of-google-maps-redux.html https://maps.googleblog.com/2011/07/evolving-look-of-google-...
    - iggldiggl 4y ago

hjjjjjje 4y ago

Dragging the sliders doesn't work when viewing on a mobile device.

tacker2000 4y ago
Works fine on my iphone 12 with ios 14.5.1
- dspillett 4y ago
  Extra anecdata in case the creator is reading: sliders failed for me on Android Chrome this morning. I made no effort to check if this was due to a script failing to load or some other bug.
gnfargbl 4y ago
Same here, on Android Chrome. The JS script that the author is using relies on listening to both mousedown and touchstart events, etc. It isn't clear to me why Android has a problem with that, but I wonder if switching to listening only for pointer events [1] would fix things. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_events https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_eve...

qwertox 4y ago

It's interesting to see how segmented Antwerpen was back in 1777, what the author describes as hedges. These were usually the result of inheritance, when the land of one owner got split into pieces and each child then got one piece. They got smaller and smaller. I didn't think that this was already so extreme in 1777, but comparing it to the other maps, only Antwerpen and Brugge seem to be affected.

ssl232 4y ago

I dabbled in web-based mapping a couple years ago and found the tech stack to be really quite polished. Starting from a database of features from e.g. OpenStreetMap hosted in a Postgres-based PostGIS map server, and geographical boundaries via special shape files, you can write XML files representing the features you wish to see on each layer of the map (using SQL queries intended for PostGIS), and CSS-like style files representing how the features should look. You then set up a tile server (Apache or nginx or whatever) that generates tiles on demand and performs caching. Finally you use a JavaScript library to provide the "slippy map" that users can drag around. All of these layers of the tech stack have FOSS implementations; indeed most of the most widely used ones are FOSS. And then there's QGIS (also FOSS) to do most of this in a similar fashion, but offline. As merely a dabbler having a bit of fun, it's rather excellent I must say. It would be interesting to hear from anyone working in this field professionally as to how the FOSS tools measure up.

mjbrownie 4y ago
I've recently started working in this space. Loads of applications in research, Ag tech and environmental science and it's mostly using this tech stack (as well as GeoServer.) Definitely a nice change from my typical ecommerce/saas work. Working with some long term geo/surveyor types and they seem happy with the open source offerings.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
navbaker 4y ago
QGIS is enormously valuable to those of us who need to do what I would non-authoritatively term "intermediate level geospatial analysis" in jobs that might not have geospatial analysis as part of the official job description, but don't have thousands of dollars available for the ludicrously expensive ArcGIS license.
- starwind 4y ago
  I find the analysts still need ArcGIS, but on the geospatial software development side I've never run into something I couldn't use QGIS for

ageitgey 4y ago

As an avid fan of both old maps and QGIS, I just want to say that this is rad. Great job!

de_huit 4y ago

Nice project, and nice map! I did not know the Ferraris map, it is gorgeous. It would love to see a tile server of this map, preferably with a switch between the old and the new map. There is a 'time travel app' for Belgium [1] that includes the Ferraris map, and even older maps. It's a bit clunky, I like the Dutch topotijdreis (topo-time-travel) [2] a lot more, but it seems like the maps are not as old and not as good, I have to slide to 1898 to get a colored map of Amsterdam. [1] https://www.geopunt.be/kaart?app=Reis_door_de_tijd_app https://www.geopunt.be/kaart?app=Reis_door_de_tijd_app [2] https://www.topotijdreis.nl/kaart/1898/@122079,487387,9.49 https://www.topotijdreis.nl/kaart/1898/@122079,487387,9.49

Aardwolf 4y ago
This looks like a decent interactive Ferraris 1777 map: https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/belgium-1777/ https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/belgium-1777/

martin_a 4y ago

Side note: I love this style of "artwork". I also enjoy old books with paintings, older maps and whatnot and can look at them for hours. Maybe it's because I work in print media and know how fast and good modern tools are, so I can estimate (and value) how complicated it was to create all the graphics in former times. So: Great project to bring back the old style for modern data.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
There needs to be an icon set for gallows, gibbets, witch pyres, and dragon lairs and for coastal areas, sea monsters, whirlpools, mermaids, treasure, and of course an edge of the flat world.
- martin_a 4y ago
  here be dragons!

RickyPointin 4y ago

janlaureys 4y ago

Cool, my street was already there in 1777. I absolute love this.

Bedon292 4y ago

Several of the original maps have some added topology on them, and I think a simplified hill shade could help pop the new ones in a similar manner. You can put it on with something like 90% transparency and get a bit of a pop to add more depth to it. I used to do this back when I still made paper maps, but it should work just as well in a totally digital format. Edit: On the github readme the author addresses this some. General elevation data isn't in OSM, so it was deemed out of scope for this project.

wiredfool 4y ago
The datasets are out there, and it's totally possible to do in QGIS. I've done it for Ireland so that I had hillshade on my personal cycling friendly maps. You just need a DEM model of the area of interest and run a hillshade operation on it. There are a couple of decent DEM datasets, SRTM and Gebco are two that I've run across.

starwind 4y ago

Is that how the colors of the maps actually looked in 1777? I always assumed that the colors had faded but I never really thought about it until now

markstos 4y ago

Love it!

yokto 4y ago

Nice! The rendering is more polished than what I did a few years ago in another similar project: apply CycleGAN style transfer on Google Maps / OpenStreetMap tiles to redraw them interactively as old hand-drawn maps https://github.com/nathanvogel/deepmaps https://github.com/nathanvogel/deepmaps

kerneis 4y ago

Mappy.cz has a layout to visualize CZ with a 19th century map: https://en.mapy.cz/19stoleti?x=13.9488027&y=50.4665536&z=12 https://en.mapy.cz/19stoleti?x=13.9488027&y=50.4665536&z=12 It would be awesome to have a similar style available there. I wonder how much work it would entail.