Atlas of US Historical Geography Digitized 24
memnock writes "Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932, has been digitized by The Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. From the website: 'Here you will find one of the greatest historical atlases: Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. This digital edition reproduces all of the atlas's nearly 700 maps. Many of these beautiful maps are enhanced here in ways impossible in print, animated to show change over time or made clickable to view the underlying data—remarkable maps produced eight decades ago with the functionality of the twenty-first century.'"
3 3 3 (Score:2)
There goes my next 10 weekends :P
On a 'missing the spirit' question - licence? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't seem to find what licence the above work is under.
Great - I can go and browse it.
Can I print out a cake with a small map from the above site on and sell it to commemorate a local event.
Or t-shirts?
Or...
oDBl, CC-by, Crowley, ...
Re:On a 'missing the spirit' question - licence? (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I can determine, the content should be in the public domain.
First, on the book itself. As a 1932 book, it isn't automatically public domain, since only books published before 1923 are old enough to automatically be public domain due to age. However, works published between 1923 and 1963 had to file copyright renewals after 28 years to receive an extended copyright, and it's estimated that Michael Lesk, the Stanford Library [stanford.edu], and a transcription effort by Project Gutenberg volunteers, the complete book renewal records are now indexed in machine-readable / searchable form, so you can pretty reliably determine whether a book from 1923-1963 (assuming the U.S. was the original place of publication) is out of copyright. And this one does not appear [stanford.edu] to have had its copyright renewed.
Having determined that the original book is out of copyright, any scans of it are probably also out of copyright, since a scan of a work doesn't constitute a new creative work, merely a reproduction of the original, so a new copyright doesn't attach. The leading U.S. case there that's generally followed is Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel [wikipedia.org], which held that Corel wasn't violating Bridgeman Art Library's copyright by copying their JPGs of paintings from a CD-ROM, because JPGs of public-domain paintings don't get a new copyright. Though it isn't a Supreme Court case and isn't binding on all courts, it seems to be generally followed.
Re:On a 'missing the spirit' question - licence? (Score:5, Informative)
Dammit, this got garbled because Slashdot barfed on a less-than sign. What this should have said:
Re: (Score:1)
I'd rather have the karma go to someone with the decency to provide an articulate answer than any of the myriad sarcastic-aggressive trolls with ID numbers.
Ohmygod ohymgod ohmygod (Score:1)
Explore moments where third-party candidates affected the outcome of presidential elections.
I just came.
Isls de los dadrones (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Considering it was taken off the native Americans, all of the modern Americas could be described as that... ;-)
TWO 21st century public domain distribution models (Score:2)
Project 'A'
1. scan/digitize and 'snap' maps to geo coords and add markup
2. create website using active server scripts and HTML/js for drag/zoom navigation
3. release to the world with great fanfare
4. site is slashdotted, then eventually settles down to several terabytes/mo bandwidth
5. one year in, site is on the radar of cost/benefit analysis as an escalating expense
6. two years in, routine site changes break the atlas with few to mourn it (and,or) the bean counters pull the plug on it
Project 'B'
1. just scan
Re: (Score:2)
Doing A does not preclude doing B. In fact, they'd probably enjoy it if someone volunteered to do B.
My guess as to why they did A is:
1. There's the "ooh, shiny" effect that makes donors to the project know that their money went to what the grant applications said it was for.
2. The people who put it together probably believe (with good reason) that they might have expertise in fitting the maps together, and the goal of the project was more to make use of that expertise to make things more coherent than it wa
Stunning. (Score:2)
The organization is wonderful - clicking through serial maps of settlements, the movement of slave populations, native populations, transportation modes is incredibly informative. When my grandparents we born there were two - count'em - two - actual cities in Arizona. No wonder they stayed in New England. What happened between 1800 and 1810 in LA that moves slaves there? Or the same in TX from 1840-1850?