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.
Admin Levels
1=Empire
2=Country, Dominion, Protectorate, British Raj
3=Colony, League of Nations Mandated Territory
4=Palatinate, minor possessions, Province/State of a Colony
Progress Examples
New South Wales Colony (1788-1825)
British Honduras (1862-1964)
British Empire (1859-1868)
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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.
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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.
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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!