Fortmapper: Side project takes on a new life
Documenting co-ordinates of fortifications in India has been a hobby for a few years.
If you’ve read travel blogs documenting visits to forts in India, you will understand my frustrations when the posts fail to provide an exact location. I’ve spent hours trying to follow inexact instructions in those posts, just so I could arrive at a (Lat, Long) on Google Maps.
I started out doing things that don’t scale, by tracing routes on a map and jotting down the (Lat, Long) on paper. After a few months of this approach, I started to lose my notes, especially as I moved to Sydney and back.
At some point in the last few years, I came around to converting my paper notes into a text file. This was followed by copy-pasting Google Maps URLs into the text file.
Pretty soon I had advanced to the stage where I was locating more forts using Google Maps satellite imagery than those documented by travellers. Wikimapia turned out to be very helpful because I was able to mark locations inaccessible to travellers, and those forts which had never ever been located on a modern map. At one point, I had a Wordpress page which proved to be quite expensive to maintain, time-wise. I wanted to spend my time locating forts rather than blogging about what I’d discovered.
Lately, services such as Google Fusion Table and its APIs have been very useful in keeping my effort focussed on locating forts, rather then the dreary work of documenting them. A few scripts here and a few scripts there keeps me focused on the mapping part of the job, than the documenting part of it.
As of today, I have locations of 516 forts documented.
My sources of information have included:
- Easy to Research: Community of mappers on Wikimapia.
- Easy to Research: Wikipedia
- Hard to Research: Imperial Gazetteer of India at:
http://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/gazetteer/
Especially useful for forts that have been destroyed, developed over or encroached upon since the British Raj. - Very Hard to Research: Detailed maps from US Army Maps Service at:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/india/
I am averaging about 10 a week so I should be able to double this number by end of 2016. That should be an interesting OKR.