Project Description
I have started mapping the British Empire, anyone is welcome to join. I will be sharing my ideas and progress on the British Empire on this page, and you can also share your ideas or criticism. I am mapping every possession of the empire and then adding each boundary change onto the British Empire chronology. I have a spreadsheet where I’m tracking the boundary changes. I have also made a research tab in the spreadsheet where I can just copy my tags and paste them into JOSM instead of manually writing them each time.
Thanks for documenting your work and allowing us to follow your progress. It’s a big task, but an important entity to have on the map.
Provinces and states are generally level 4, a practice we inherited from OSM. But under the proposed scheme, the Thirteen Colonies would be level 6 until the American Revolution when they become level 4, which might be counterintuitive, since there’s nothing at level 4 until then. It might be a different story if you map the British Overseas Territories as admin_level=2 and need to nest each territory under it, but I think it’s a more modern concept that didn’t exist for much of the empire’s existence.
From this post, it looks like you might be encountering a need to distinguish between possessions of differing importance. admin_level may not be the best tool for that, but we can make such distinctions using the more flexible border_type key on boundary relations and an analogous place key on place points, if present. The renderer doesn’t currently distinguish between border_type=dominion and border_type=palatinate, for example, but it could.
As long as we rely on these other keys to make fine-grained distinctions, admin_level can be more basic: 2 for countries or country-equivalents (i.e., possessions), and 4 for political subdivisions like provinces and states. 3 and 5 exist for rare edge cases. This allows the renderer and geocoder to make generalizations where the specific political arrangements aren’t as relevant.
I see your point about states, I’ll make them level 4, but the Thirteen Colonies are all separate colonies, so they would all be level 3. Or would you make them a separate entity called The Thirteen Colonies with admin level 2?
Oh, that’s true. The notion of a “Thirteen Colonies” is less about borders than about a collection of things, for which we could maintain a collection relation containing chronology relations, if necessary. I guess the same is true about something like the present-day British Overseas Territories, whereas the present-day French equivalent is formally a single department.
Bravo, Charlie! This is my kind of project. Big, audacious, open to collaboration, and what will undoubtedly create a wonderful data artifact when complete.
Where are you based? Have you hit up anyone from any Anglophile DH projects to help out? How can others help spread the word?
I live in the former British colony of Belize. I haven’t seen anyone yet that’s very interested in mapping such a large project, and in a way I don’t mind, because mapping the relations accurately is a tricky task that would get way harder if more people were involved.
Welcome to the world of collaborative open source projects. You feel the pain and the need for training. I hear you on the difficulties, but a couple adages come to mind:
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go as a team.
and
The more, the merrier.
That said, if you want to press forward with a smaller group, I bet / hope you’ll get some helpers along the way. And, if you change your mind, I’ll do some recruiting outreach. Respect the ownership you’ve taken here. Bravo!
You’ll have to do a tutorial some day on how to make animations. Though I actually wish someone would make a website or even part of the main website where you can see timelapses of chronologies.
I know, it isn’t pretty or particularly easy to follow. I’d really appreciate if someone could take these workflows for a spin and fill in any gaps. It definitely needs screenshots. QGIS is overflowing with powerful cartographic processing and styling options. Any tips and tricks we can recommend will also benefit the OSM community, which definitely doesn’t play with QGIS enough.
It’s a little broader than chronologies, but I think we have all the ingredients for exporting animated GIFs or animated PNGs of the OHM basemap over time:
Let’s share our forays into making animations based on OHM data. I’d be happy to feature them on our social media accounts.