All good maps have a story to tell. This site shares one. See it at https://www.mobilemap.us/.
Mobile, Alabama is a coastal city with a rich New World history spanning French, British, Spanish, American, Confederate, and ultimately (again) American governance. This interactive map shows current Mobile, Alabama with visual context from other eras in the city's history, using modern Web technology to juxtapose new and old cartography products.
- Historic map notes
- Technical notes
- Open-source software used in this project
- Map hosting providers
- Changelog
- License
I have more maps in the pipeline. Contact me if you can help source or georeference interesting, high quality historic maps of the area.
- Webmap is built on the excellent open-source Leaflet framework
- I used the stellar open-source QGIS to georeference the scanned images. My georeferencing isn't perfect but it's close. Read more about georeferencing these maps.
- Within the repo is a script (
scrape_historic_places.py) to scrape and parse the Mobile, AL National Registry of Historic Places data from Wikipedia. The script exports the data to.geojsonusable in Leaflet. Beautiful Soup made this process really easy to code. - The webmap loads quite a bit of Javascript... I'm serving it all locally rather than calling it through a CDN. Since the site is hosted on AWS EC2 it should load as quickly as anything else, I think. Lemme know if there's a better way to do that.
- Update: moved hosting to Netlify. Seems to load quicker than it did from AWS.
- In addition to all the Javascript, the raster historic maps are really heavy
This project would not exist without the talented developers in the FOSS geospatial community. Thank you.
- QGIS
- Leaflet.js, Copyright (c) 2010-2016, Vladimir Agafonkin Copyright (c) 2010-2011, CloudMade, BSD 2-clause Simplified License
- Leaflet.MagnifyingGlass, Copyright (c) 2013 Benjamin Becquet, MIT License
- EasyButton.js, Copyright (C) 2014 Daniel Montague, MIT License
- Leaflet.fullscreen, Copyright (c) 2013, Bruno Bergot, MIT License
- Leaflet.StyledLayerControl (CC Attribution 3.0 Unported License)
- Leaflet.markercluster, Copyright 2012 David Leaver, MIT License
- sidebar-v2, Copyright (c) 2013 Tobias Bieniek, MIT License
Thanks for supporting free-tier users!
- 2017-05-20 Initial version of map online at my professional website
- 2017-05-27 Moved map to Netlify to take advantage of their CDN, Git integration, and pricing for open-source projects
- 2017-06-06 Revamped to add sidebar and default fullscreen. Added MIT license.
This is free software under the MIT License.