Mapping Card Photographs

Today, I posted the following to the GenPhoto email discussion group. I thought it would make a good addition to the blog as well.

Google has a new service called My Maps enabling anyone to create a public or private map containing descriptive markers for just about anything. The markers can contain rich text and images.

Card photographs make an ideal subject for mapping, since they generally are imprinted with the location of the photographer's studio on the back or front. This makes is possible to create a marker for each studio. If the photograph has a known date (a tax stamp date, indicated in writing or estimated from the card style or knowledge of the subject), studios can be mapped as the photographer moves.

I have mapped the known studio locations for J. G. Mangold, a significant nineteenth-century studio photographer and publisher of stereoviews in the Quad Cities region and Florida.

I encourage everyone to note the photographer's imprint on the back of the card photographs in their family collection and create markers on Google's MyMaps (or other similar collaborative or shared mapping services). It would be a fascinating exercise and could provide useful data on historic studio photographers to map their studios. For example, an overview of studio distribution could be seen; the movements of photographers as they migrated west could be made visible.

It is also possible to do this on wikimapia.org, which is a collaborative project where anyone can describe a location. You may find it a little more difficult to use than Google's MyMaps, but the
idea of an independent non-commercial (at least for now...I do not believe they are associated with the Wikipedia, but seems to be done in the same spirit) mapping project is appealing. I will leave that for others unless I have time to explore this possibility. I have not explored Flickr maps or Picasa albums or the wikimapia for this purpose yet.

It would be nice if Google maps could associate a date with the place, so that historical layers could be shown, so that historical locations and descriptions could be separated from contemporary ones. I made sure I put circa dates on the entries so people are not confused when the map comes up in Google search. It would be helpful, for example, to display locations between a range of dates, so that the studios between 1861 and 1865 only could be mapped. The distribution prior to 1861 could be mapped and compared to before and after the war.

What would be truly powerful is if the collaborative mapping could be combined with shared mapping to allow collectors of photographs and people with family photographs from the nineteenth-century to cooperate and somehow merge this kind of information. So that if I
create a map of studios from my card photographs and someone else does the same, that one could look up the photographer and see a combined list of all the locations. Or the same if everyone located the individual photographs. I suppose this might be possible through
Picasa if it were integrated into the mapping system or through Flickr's geotagging maps system for their albums.

What I need to do is attach an album of photographs to a location, since there can be more than one photograph and more than one imprint per location, but this is a good start. With Flickr or Picasa albums, I suppose it would be possible for collectors to put their photographs online, map them, and the display an aggregate map of all the images.

I hope to revisit the map with more data and pictures and in time explore the other possibilities.

The power to map any kind of data easily could have profound affects on folk studies, genealogy and social history.