Week 4 - Map of Early Modern London

For this week's questions, I decided to go back to some digitized materials that I had looked at in the past, and see if any of these projects were available in XML. I was very surprised to find that a comprehensive map of Early Modern London was part of this list! The "Agas" map, named for the surveyor Ralph Agas, was originally printed from woodblocks c. 1561. The version that was digitized is a re-print c. 1633, as none of the original copies had survived. 

Map of Early Modern London. University of Victoria.
http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/map.htm

The digitization was done by the London Metropolitan Archives, and is part of a larger project that is currently hosted by the University of Victoria. It allows users to visualize, overlay, combine and query information on the people, organization, locations etc. that were in the city at the time. This information (along with the map itself) is hosted on a larger Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) database. So all this to say... it's super neat and you should really check it out!
When I originally looked at this material, it was while doing research for a graduate degree in History. I did not think to look for any XML, and in fact I'm not sure I would have known what it was at the time if I had seen it. However, not only does the site provide an XML version of the map, but it provides several versions, all of which are explained in some detail. Even more surprisingly, the link to the XML is displayed very prominently (no digging required).
You can easily download the various XML versions. 

Map of Early Modern London. University of Victoria.
http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/xml_outputs.xml

Map of Early Modern London. University of Victoria.
http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/xml_outputs.htm

Or, if you're not sure which is which, you can click on "what are these XML versions" to get a explanation of exactly what you will be looking at.


The project also confirms that all outputs are validated against the TEI schema, and states that new outputs will be added as they get better at encoding the map using XML.

If you have only minor experience in using XML, or are starting a project and wondering how to use modify TEI just enough without becoming incomprehensible, I think that these multiple versions would be such a wonderful resource to start with. I also think that it is a wonderful example of a more visual resources that can also be encoded (several times!) using XML.

To check it out, visit: The Map of Early Modern London
(I recommend clicking on 'map' -> 'view the full map' to really get a neat experience playing around with the database.)

References:

University of Victory. The Map of Early Modern London. http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/