 Hi everyone, I'm Tim Franson, a web and graphic designer and technology designer at South Bank of University. Today I'm going to talk about a project called Map of Essex 1777, and there will be an opportunity to explore the map and find a cartographic folly to be entered into a prize draw to win a one-off 80 prints of one of the associated great sheets, which is as the prize. So Map of Essex is an open access resource which shares a remarkable 17th century map of the county and supports all modern, desktop and mobile platforms for the benefit of students, teachers, historians, researchers and other interested people. I produced a map of Essex using scans and digital images from the Essex Records Office, the Spanish virtual library of bibliographical heritage and layers of London, another map-based history project. Here are three iterations produced today, so from the left to the right, version one in 2017, using scans of an Essex Records Office volume published in 1950, version two in 2018, using scans of the original map courtesy of the head of digital projects Julio Cordel El Viro at the virtual library of bibliographical heritage, and a GPS version three in 2021 using a geo-referenced digital image prepared by layers of London and GIS officer Lewis Calvert, so GIS's geographic information system. In 2010, I bought this 18th century timber frame cottage in Mockford, Essex, and while researching the building's history, became aware of pioneering work of cartographers, John Chapman and Peter Andre, not the musician, who surveyed the county of Essex between 1772 and 74, so that's the two fellows there. The resulting atlas of 25 engraved sheets, plus a key sheet showing the arrangement of the plates, was published in 1777. For the use of landowners, professionals and businessmen, the atlas shows about 10,000 place names, 5,000 farms, 400 churches and 400 mills. And was the first of the entire county that was extraordinarily detailed, so it's about two inches to the mile and accurate. So, I discovered this Essex records publication entitled a reproduction of a map of the county of Essex 1777 by John Chapman and Peter Andre in Southern Library. The publication consists of a title page, introduction and end matter, 24 plates and that key plate printed on heavy cartage paper and half the size of the original engraving. The hardback edition cost 21 shillings, there was a soft cover edition which cost eight shillings and six plates, or you could buy separate sheets for six plates from booksellers. To extend the publication's original intention to enable a wider public to enjoy this remarkable map at low prices. So that's sort of noted in the publications end matter. I decided to produce high resolution scans and publication and began kind of researching the best way to share share the map. I settled on a range of technologies and process discussed a little later and built a prototype version one which I shared with the Essex records office and who after a bit of two and throwing and grinding permission to make make it public. Here's an example of one of the plates plate plate 18 and and the detail. One was was well received and shared amongst the network of local Essex history groups. Whilst this was happening, I began contacting libraries, archives, trusts individuals in possession of the original Atlas explain project and possibilities of scanning the original plates to produce a sort of envisioned version version two. The responses weren't promising from 6,900 pounds for digitization and online permission fees for five years to a disappointing silence. I was quite tenacious. I scoped beyond the UK shores and discovered the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, Virtual Library of Bibliographical Heritage, had the Atlas in their collection. I will translate my Spanish being non existent. I emailed the head of digital projects within 24 hours. I received a reply from Julio Cordello, El Vero, who loved the version one prototype within within a week. I received 25 archive master files and was grant granted perpetual online commission in support of the open access publication project. So version version two had been given the green light essentially. This is an example of the same same plate and and and the detail and and here's here's a side by side comparison of the ER publication, which is kind of a bit like a photo copy if you like and and the superior scans of the original engraving. There's lots on the map. So there's buildings and accepting streets at nearly every house and cottages show. Conventional signs donate windmills and water mills and the principal seats and their owners and most of the manor houses and farmhouses are named roads. The first printed map of Essex to show minor roads bridges milestones and turnpike gates are also integrated. The countryside parks, woods and heaths mostly named a draw. The address indicates accurately the area of many a common and village green lost or drastically reduced because of the enclosure acts. The coastline and every creek wharf he very duck decoy and cliff is shown distinction is made between marshland and saltings. And churches have got in the middle here ashington church shown in a and a sort of perspective view with some some attempt to denote styles of of towers. Here's an overview of the three stage production process and software utility and open source JavaScript live library that was used to produce version one version two and the only are 23 edition, which will be able to explore shortly. So stage one Photoshop to stitch together the 25 separate plates into one large image file. I sort of call this the production image. And I popped in again as well so that being equally capable tool to to do that not not wanting to be an adobe salesperson. G dal so that's geographic data abstraction library and to G dal and open source software library for reading and writing best vector and raster geospatial data formats within the library. This is a whole range of different rules I use utility called G dal to tiles. Basically generate small tiles from the large production image to enable online viewing. And finally, stage stage three leaflet is the leading open source JavaScript library for creating mobile friendly interactive maps. It's designed with simplicity performance and usability in mind it works efficiently across all major desktop and mobile platforms and can be extended with lots of plugins as an easy to use and well documented API and straightforward readable source code which is all very well commented. So production process stage one is the production image of the 25 sheets stitched together the PSP image file and sizes a huge 9.1 gigabytes and you could print this image file three meters high. You could print it with dots per inch without any kind of pixelation or D grade. And so I popped Mel Gibson or William Wallace as a kind of an idea of scale. Anyone who's used Photoshop Photoshop and PSP format so Photoshop document that stands for switches to something called PSP so that just stands for Photoshop big when cameras with or height exceeds 30 30,000 pixels. The file is exported as a 30,000 pixel wide JPEG the maximum Photoshop can export in this format and bring the file size down to to about 810 10 megabytes in stage to so this diagram shows the next stage of production using the G dal to tiles. To generate small tiles which are like 256 pixel square so quite a teeny tiles from the exported production image to enable efficient online online viewing G dal to tiles is written in Python is run in a text based terminal and involves just one command line where one config is parameters such as the local location of the Python script. The production image and the output folder to export tiles as as shown here in just some red outlines and lines and other parameters shown here that the kind of zoom level to render so you can determine how many how many zoom levels there are. So you can see that it chops up tiles accordingly. And about 10 minutes. The process is complete and the output folder contains about 15,000 tiles and the size is crept up to 2.4 gigabytes. So it's stage stage three and finally just the the web viewers created you with HTML and CSS and the leaflet Java JavaScript library and all all this including the tile file folder is uploaded to a green web server, more about re-hosting a little a little later. So since version two's launch in 2018 Mac of Essex has received over 30,000 unique visits comprising about 45,000 sessions and notably visits increased during lockdown. Big jump up there. So during the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting its use to support homeschooling informal heritage learning and self self directed activities. And as a result, Map of Essex was selected as a featured learning resource by Essex 2020, a year long, county wide celebration of science technology engineering arts and mathematics and was nominated and notable and are up for the International Society for the International Society of the Maps inaugural prize in Map History 2021. So just down the bottom there. Additionally, the map has featured in a museum of London's Havering Horde, a bronze aid mystery, Epian Forest interpretation boards, so here on the left, and layers of London. And so I shared version two's digital assets with layers of London. This other another map based history website and developed by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. You can see the map of Essex integrated into the human interactive map platform that they use. Layers layers of London includes a range of historical maps and information overlays my work keeps trying to install new software on my computer. Can't get rid of them overlays. So yeah, information overlays about various topics and things. So the dark area you see there is an overlay of 24,000 aerial photographs of London taken by the RF immediately after World War two so you can see the kind of the bomb damage. And this was a crowd sourced project to do all that, that work and all the geo referencing was done by schools and volunteers, which I was one of those. So through this partnership with geo reference, Mac image. So it's a geno tiff. That's the file format was created for the GPS enabled version of the map of Essex to support kind of field trips. geo referencing is a technique where you kind of you kind of manipulate and position a scan map of an aerial photograph or scan map. It lays over a spatial reference system so you kind of you kind of tweak and you pin things and kind of manipulate it. So so the gaps are the results of that manipulation so you can see kind of where areas don't quite map on. So if you imagine a kind of satellite image behind behind that, but it is quite incredible how close the 18th century map is to today's precisely measured locations on the surface of the of the earth. And here's a screenshot of map of Essex, the GPS version, the little red dot there. That's my home shows says one's one's location. The the web viewer and the new GPS tracking functionality is dealt with using the leaflet JavaScript library as with version one and two. However, the geo reference tileset was created and hosted by Matt Tyler desktop I think it's now called engine piece of software. Another another another platform another mapping platform designed for developers for publishing interactive maps in web applications and mobile, mobile, mobile devices. So about sustainability, not including labor which I provided a sort of gratis. The map of Essex costs about 100 pounds a year to run, which basically covers green web hosting domain registration and site maintenance and security. So you can connect through play printing print sales. So here's one of the prints here, and simply donations, what, and pay what what you can afford. And presently map of Essex has generated enough funds to cover the next five five and a half years. So the map of Essex is hosted on a verified green hosting service for the details about carbon pluting data data centers and supporting the transition towards a green internet is available via the sort of there's a floating climate emergency declaration and green hosting button which is on the map of Essex website. Okay. So, find the the folly so cartographic follies are deliberate fictitious entries on maps to help reveal plagiarism or copyright infringement. You might put the fake streets or something something like that. It was also a practice of kind of cartographers that are simply this board and they just make things up. So it can also be just for just for fun. So if you scan or visit that address at the bottom or scan the QR QR code this will take you to the area 23 edition. And I'd like you to kind of the challenges explore the explore the map and find the cartographic folly which is the area. You can see the folly just in the folly and the area 23 logo so it's it's nestled next to a particular place place name. If I just pop to the site. There we go. So here's here's this window here and you can you can zoom zoom around, etc. within that or you can click the full screen and that will pop it out into the full screen of your browser. Few little instructions there. So just sort of similar to Google Maps on a computer you can zoom in and out by using the plus and the plus plus and minus buttons by double clicking so you can just double click. You can use the mouse scroll wheel to zoom zoom in and out. And what you'll notice is those tiles building up. So it's kind of like the images rather than this, this couple of gigabytes of image. It's pulling in little little teeny squares. And to move around the map you simply click and drag or use your keyboard arrow keys on a mobile you just use typical navigation gestures, such as press and drag to move around and the map around the map and double tap or pinch and spread to zoom to zoom in and out. Okay, so it'd be quite a task for you to kind of find it with that just being the, so I've got a little clue here, clue to the follies location so in 1274 where in Essex was this revered Scottish national hero, possibly born. And so it's a contested possibility. You know, the village says definitely this person was born there. When you when you find the folly email a screenshot to myself at map of Essex dot UK by noon tomorrow to be entered into a prize draw to win a one off print 80 print print of the associate sheet and the winner will be announced and receive the print at the end of the conference. Just a few shout outs thanks thanks to the generous generous institutional supporters and individual donors who have collectively helped to realize the project and ensure this this remarkable map reaches the widest public and remains free access accessible for everyone. Also to Alice you for funding travel and accommodation all for the scholarship reward and print room, print room group and providing the print giveaway and thanks. Thanks for listening. How are we doing? I did time it last night. So I guess any any kind of questions. Further further. Is the map also downloadable for reuse in. Not only only kind of. HTML but also do you have it. I have but not it's not available. So in a way I was quite open with it. Couple of people that said, oh, could I have this and I was, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they started printing them for profits. So I've sort of paused pause that because it's kind of one of the things that enables the thing to stay. Yeah, because we work with our kids and we make interactive maps. Yeah, and they are three or four maps on each other to see the growth of the city or an environment. Yeah. So then in because you're talking about sustainability, then we have to open and make it sustainable. Yeah, probably between higher education institutions for the use. Yeah, I mean the, the, the actual map itself can be overlaid over. So it's just, it's just a strip of code that needs to go into whatever GIS is. So currently, I got contacted from a geography department at college university which are doing a project on projects about wetland environments and mortality in England. The 17th and 18th century self-shared, so they can kind of put that map with their kind of data on mortality. So it's really the, the geo reference one, which is kind of the most significant one. It's a little bit like the John Snow maps of the cholera in London. So you can, how they, they've enabled us to look at disease in a very different way, you know, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. That's good. Any other questions, John? Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.