Finding Scotland - An Android application to analyse historical change from 19th century until today for Scotland

Abstract

Historical Maps are the sources of geographical information of a place at a given period of time. They are highly useful documents which pictorially displays the topography of a place. Beyond 18th century maps are highly helpful to analyse the effects of Industrial Revolution which chiefly resulted in the expansion of urbanisation with high effects on the economy of a place. These maps form concrete evidences about the changes that occurred in settlements, land use, roads, railways, counties, parishes, villages, hamlets, farms, towns, rivers etc. This project aims at allowing the people to analyze this historical transformation on their handheld devices dynamically for Scotland. The main objective of this research is to create an Android application – Finding Scotland, which will assist the people with an additional interest in culture to have a unique experience to travel into their past using historical maps from 19th century. This will let them understand how the place under their feet had changed within the period twenty centuries using current Ordnance Survey, 2011. The people can select the cultural features around their vicinity and confirm their analysis with the additional textual and pictorial information provided by GfS. The intention of this project is to provide best GIS tools to analyse this change easily and flawlessly using these one inch to one mile maps provided by NLS. Two options of analyzing historical change has been given in this paper: 1. Series – Going through Historic maps consecutively 2. Overlay: - Overlaying two maps for exploring past.