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Investigating A Cartographic Niche: Drawing Maps For Historians, Kate Blackmer

Masters Theses

Drawing maps for historians involves a number of distinct challenges. The historical cartographer must grapple not only with geological changes over time, but geographical ones, from human-cultural to physical, and from political to spatial. Original manuscripts must be read with close attention toward extracting geographical data, map sources must be vetted, and design challenges must be resolved. Furthermore, many of the antiquarian sources that are used to create current-day maps of historical times have unique scales, projections, and senses of place—all of which present complications that need to be overcome when creating historically based maps for publication. This thesis describes …