Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Analysis of Pre-Geodetic Maps in
Search of Construction Steps Details
Gabriele Bitelli, Stefano Cremonini and Giorgia Gatta
Additional information is available at the end of the chapter
http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/46189
1. Introduction
Cartographic Heritage consists in the whole amount of ancient cartographic documents (not
only maps, but also atlas, planispheres, globes, ...) the history has brought us, today
perceived as a cultural value to be necessarily preserved due to its historical and
geographical content as well as its artistic value. It is a great but often poorly known
heritage, because usually ancient cartographic documents are kept in places closed to the
public, and only occasionally they are proved valuable outside of specific research activities.
The recovery of ancient cartography is intended to save, and possibly to spread throughout
a wide public, Cartographic Heritage, making use of the potential it offers. Unfortunately,
ancient cartographic documents often suffer from preservation problems of their analogue
support (an organic material, thus subject to wear), mostly due to aging. Therefore, the
recovery of ancient cartography firstly consists in traditional restoration, intended to
safeguard the analogue support against the damaging effects of time. Beside this, a recovery
of the content of historical documents is also possible, carrying the cartographic document
to a different support, usually a digital one. In such a way, regeneration of ancient
cartography in a digital environment is an interesting way of Cultural Heritage preservation
and valorisation.
Digital regeneration is not exhaust by the digitization step: modern digital techniques allow
new chances of using the map information, which would be unachievable on an analogue
support. In particular, georeferencing and analysis of map deformations help in metric
analysis of ancient cartography. In fact, usually the metric precision of an ancient
cartographic document can be very different from that of a present map, due to an amount
of deformations and errors that can be very high with respect to our standards. For example,
graphical deformations can be induced by the old type of cartographic transformation (if
one exists, it can be different from the modern ones), whereas other deformations can be due
