Exploring our archives

Since my earlier post on mapping, I’ve been thinking about how modern mapping tools could be used to represent historical situations. Google is releasing several ‘mashup’ tools at the moment and one of the most useful is ‘My Maps’, which allows you to ‘tag’ certain points on a map and associate them with text, pictures or media files. I’ve begun experimenting with using this tool to map the correspondents of the Royal Society during the period of my interest, 1660-1670. This is very much a work in progress and undertaken very unscientifically (just using the contacts that I noted while going through the Hooke folio) but it still gives a visual idea of the scope of the Society’s interests in the period. The map is here. You can also view it in Google Earth by exporting the KML file by pressing the blue button at the top of the screen.

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