My approach to mapping in my one-place study so far has been to:
- photograph all the maps I could find in our local library (unfortunately this had to be in sections and suffers from normal problems of distortion)
- organise and present them in my database and website (where permitted) - see here
- find and present whatever useful online maps I could (eg the wonderful maps from NLS - the National Library of Scotland)
- (crudely) georeference the 25 inch OS maps of the village and prepare a book to show how each street changed over time - see here
- add a few Google maps to the website using the MapPress plugin for WordPress - see here and here
- have a good look at some of the maps and ask questions about them, eg about some of the roads
- try, so far largely unsuccessfully, to work out from maps which dwellings families lived in at each of the censuses (many were just "High Street")
- realise there is so much more that mapping could do to help understand the village
Note that I will be trying out some of the technologies mentioned in this forum, and will add in my results and thoughts were appropriate in this forum; and I hope that many others do the same.
I hope that many of us will share our current conclusions as to how we think it best to do our maps. So in that spirit here is where I am:
- for general mapping I will try QGIS, and especially see how I can incorporate the history aspects
- to be able to put maps online etc, I will explore other software under the OSGeo (Open Source) banner (maybe MapServer?)
- I was thinking of trying MapBox but the free plan is limited
- because it is still quite limited at present, I will explore how I can add to the OSM data for my village
