Digimapping your Daily Mile!

We are delighted to present new learning resources that give you some great ideas for bringing your Daily Mile into the classroom. As well offering a simple way to build physical activity into your pupils’ day and clear benefits to physical and emotional health, your Daily Mile offers a hook for building your pupils’ numeracy and research skills.

The Daily Mile initiative was officially launched in 2016 to encourage all schools to get outside and walk or run for 15 minutes a day. The idea began in 2012 when Elaine Wyllie, head of a Scottish primary school, was shocked that a class of pupils struggled to run a lap of their playing field. The children and teachers decided to start running around the field for 15 minutes a day to see if they could get better at it. Within 3 months, every class in the school was doing their Daily Mile and the children loved the freedom of running, jogging, skipping or walking with their friends in all weather.  Hundreds of schools have picked it up and it’s spreading to Europe and North America too!

How can Digimap for Schools help?

Have a look at our Daily Mile resource section for ideas. A few suggestions to get started:

Measuring your Daily Mile!

Measuring your Daily Mile!

  • Plot your route and check the distance with the line drawing and measurement tool
  • Explore your area using a 1-mile buffer – where could children reach by running a mile in different directions? Extend this exercise by looking at aerial and historic maps of your area.
  • Choose a famous route, such as Harian’s Wall or the West Highland Way. Find out the distance and calculate how many Daily Miles it would take your class to complete the route!
  • Add Geograph photos to your maps to see what geographic features have been photographed in your area or find photos of famous landmarks.
  • Research and plot a route, with distance and stopping points, to show tourists around your town.

We hope you enjoy exploring the resources and bringing your Daily Mile into the classroom! Remember, we would love to see photos of the maps you create or of you out and about on your Daily Mile – tweet them to us @digimap4schools.

Managing your saved maps

We have recently added the ability to create sub-folders within your Digimap for Schools account, to help you store and organise your saved maps. You could create folders for different classes, projects, dates, places or schemes such as Duke of Edinburgh.

To get started, click on the Map Manager icon on the toolbar:

Map Manager icon

Map Manager icon

 

 

 

 

You will need your PIN to continue. These have been emailed to the main Digimap for Schools contact at your school. Check with them for the number or contact us to request it.

The Map Manager area will open and you will see a list of saved maps. It’s a good idea to create folders first. Click Add Folder on the left and name your folder. When you next create and save a map, you can select any of your folders to save the map within.

You can make the list of saved maps more manageable by filtering. Just enter your term(s) in the four boxes at the top of the list and your list will reduce. In the image below, we have input 7 in the Class box and sam in the name box:

Filtering saved maps

Filtering saved maps

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To move maps to any folder, just click a map and drag it to the folder of your choice. You can move multiple maps by checking the boxes to the right of the maps and dragging all of the selected maps to a folder.

We’ve made a short video on this feature:

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

We hope it will be a really useful tool for you. Let us know how you find it and if there is anything we can do to improve it.

Upcoming webinars

Hi folks, we have planned a series of webinars in April and May.

Webinars are free to attend. They are open to all schools subscribed to Digimap for Schools  and anyone interested in learning more about the service. To join a webinar, you must register to book your place.

To see more details on the webinar content and register, click the link after the webinar of interest to you.

Hope to see you there!

If you have any questions about attending a webinar, or would like to suggest topics for future webinars, please comment below or get in touch with the Digimap for Schools Helpdesk – digimap.schools@ed.ac.uk

Updated maps

In addition to the new MasterMap styling released yesterday updated mapping also went live.  Updates to MasterMap, VectorMap Local raster, 1:25,ooo scale raster, 1:50,000 scale raster, and 1:250,000 scale raster were released.

This brings the mapping up to date with the latest available from Ordnance Survey.  Dates of the map data are:

  • MasterMap – 11th June 2015 (detailed mapping)
  • VectorMap Local Raster – July 2015 (street level mapping)
  • 1:25,000 scale raster – June 2015
  • 1:50,000 scale raster – June 2015
  • 1:250,00 scale raster – June 2015 (road atlas style mapping)

Have a go at playing spot the difference and see if you can find changes that have appeared on the maps!

updated 250k raster example

The new Borders Railway route shown on the updated 1:250,00 scale raster

 

New and improved styling for detailed maps

A new and improved styling for MasterMap, the most detailed mapping in Digimap for Schools has been release. The previous colours have been replaced with more subtle and contemporary tones. The styling has been inspired by the simpler palate used in the VectorMap Local product which makes up the street view level mapping.

Bold greens and yellows have been replaced with white and pastel greens. Man-made surfaces (roads, pavements, surfaces, railways etc) have been brought together and a wide range of greys applied. Pavements are a more realistic light grey instead of khaki green used in the old styling. Unclassified areas (generally areas under construction) are shown with a light hatching now making them easier to identify but without dominating other features.

Example of old MasterMap styling.

Example of old MasterMap styling. Ordnance Survey © Crown Copyright and Database Right 2015. An Ordnance Survey/EDINA supplied service.

The biggest change and improvement is in the vegetation styling. Different shades of greens with clearer vegetation symbols have been used to help identification of different vegetation types. The new styling also makes it easier to see any annotations added to the map, the more subtle colours and tones allow annotations to stand out more.

A great deal of time and effort has been taken to carefully craft this new styling and we hope you find it a significant improvement over the old styling. We would love to hear your thoughts and any suggestions for improvements. Please contact the EDINA Digimap for Schools helpdesk with comments edina@ed.ac.uk

 

Example of new MasterMap styling.

Example of new MasterMap styling. Ordnance Survey © Crown Copyright and Database Right 2015. An Ordnance Survey/EDINA supplied service.

 

 

NLS publishes new 1840s-1950s Ordnance Survey detailed maps for London and South-East England

National Library of ScotlandThe National Library of Scotland has just made freely available online 16,865 historic Ordnance Survey maps covering Greater London and the south-east of England. The Ordnance Survey 25 inch to the mile (1:2,500) maps were the most detailed series covering both urban and rural areas in the 19th century, and date between the 1840s and the 1950s. The maps are immensely valuable for local history, allowing practically every feature in the landscape to be shown. They provide good detail of all buildings, streets, railways, industrial premises, parkland, farms, woodland, and rivers.

At present, coverage is of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, London, Middlesex, Surrey and Sussex. The scanning of this series is underway and will expand geographically over the next couple of years.

NLS has also georeferenced a layer of these maps dating between the 1890s-1920s, allowing them to be compared directly to modern day maps and satellite images with a transparency slider, as well as compared side by side on screen.

NLS OS 25 inch London side by side

New GB map and updated mapping

Coming very soon we will be releasing a new GB map in Digimap for Schools.  In December, Ordnance Survey released a new GB Overview map as part of their OS Open Data products.  It’s a nice and clear map with GB country boundaries and capital cities marked.  We hope that you like the new map and find it useful.

New GB map view

Also being released are updates to the mid and small scale mapping products.  These maps are being updated to the most recent versions made available to us by Ordnance Survey.  Maps that will be updated are:

  • Miniscale (January 2015)
  • 1:50 000 Raster (December 2014)
  • 1:25 000 Raster (December 2014)
  • VML Colour Raster (January 2015)

New detailed online maps covering post-War Edinburgh and London

Tony and I were contacted yesterday by our colleague Chris Fleet, Senior Map Curator at the National Library of Scotland with the exciting news that NLS have made freely available their earliest editions of Ordnance Survey National Grid maps at 1:1250 scale covering Edinburgh and London.  These were Ordnance Survey’s most detailed maps in the 20th century, and they show nearly all permanent features of over 1 square metre in size. They show excellent detail of commercial and residential buildings, railway stations, pubs, hotels, docks, factories and parks, as well as house names and numbers.

The maps can be viewed as a georeferenced overlay and as a dual-map / side-by-side viewer, allowing direct comparison with modern Google or Bing maps:

Edinburgh   georeferenced overlay    side-by-side viewer

London         georeferenced overlay    side-by-side viewer

Chris tells us this mapping layer will expand geographically over the next year as NLS continue to scan more OS National Grid post-War mapping.  To whet your appetite we’ve added a few sample London maps below.

King's Cross and St Pancras Stations

King’s Cross and St Pancras Stations

Isle of Dogs docks

Isle of Dogs docks

South Bank Festival of Britain site

South Bank Festival of Britain site

Chris would love you to come and visit the NLS site and browse through these fantastic 1940s-1960s maps for Edinburgh and London.

New term, new mapping data

Over summer, the Digimap for Schools team have been beavering away processing updated Ordnance Survey mapping for the annual data update.   Every year, we take updates from Ordnance Survey and put them into Digimap for Schools, so recent changes in your area may now be on the maps.

The mapping is all 2014 data, the specific month for each product is:

MasterMap May 2014
VectorMap Local Raster July 2014
1:25 000 Raster April 2014
1:50 000 Raster June 2014
1:250 000 Raster June 2014
MiniScale January 2014

Telling Stories with Maps

But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue.  She was all that.

How then to map that? Mrs Dalloway’s words reflect the fact that in literary narratives the sense of where one is may seem to have little to do with physical geography. While Virginia Woolf herself argued against attempting to physically locate a place an author mentions in a novel, since she believed that ‘[a] writer’s country is a territory within his own brain’, our project is based on the idea that the act of mentioning real-world place-names is in itself significant.[1] Woolf’s own liberal use of real-world place-names, albeit used with license, undermines her claims and indicate the broader basis of literary tradition and places in the world that provide a graspable structure to the reader of a literary work. Indeed, at least in terms of the significance of places the passage in Mrs Dalloway concurs, for it continues:  ‘So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places.’[2]

Hestia image

At the Hestia 2 Project symposium, Telling stories with maps, we found ourselves surrounded by scholars from diverse disciplines (including archaeology, history, political ecology, geography, philology, and international law) who were encountering similar theoretical and technological issues and questions concerning exactly what one is doing when one attempts to map qualitative narratives. Considerations of what is lost in translation from narrative to map or map to narrative form recurred throughout the day. Nonetheless, as Øyvind Eide stressed, such media differences can be productive, as long as the limits of the media are acknowledged.

There are also limits caused by availability of media platforms. Agnieszka Leszczynski and Sarah Elwood explored the ways in which hegemonic narratives of spaces and places are being contested through the wider accessibility of GIS media platforms; although in closing Leszczynski noted that nonetheless the majority of such platforms were still being created by tall, white, alpha males. Akiyoshi Suzuki explored the ways in which in Haruki Murakami’s works the dead, the lost and the forgotten are evoked as underlying human relations, for example, the circuitous walk taken by Naoko and Watanabe in Norwegian Wood follows the edges of where the land meets the water in ancient maps of Japan and passes through places relating to spirits of the dead.

Ian Gregory tackled the issue of the unmentioned places in works on the Lake District, by creating maps that make visible when places are mentioned only contingently in order to represent an otherwise indistinctly identified place or path, for example, by showing the likely path taken (from x to y) or place only indirectly mentioned (near x). Their use of the Edinburgh Geoparser to study place-name collocations is confirming the opposing nature of notions of the beautiful and the sublime in Romantic sentiment, since the places to which such epithets are applied do not tend to coincide in the text and, therefore, on the map.

This relates to the question asked of us after our presentation: whether we were not concerned that we would simply be reifying existing concepts of literary Edinburgh. In fact, as we explained, part of the aim of our project is that by uncovering thousands of works that have sunk into obscurity and by tracing the narratives told of place-names in Edinburgh across time we will be able to reflect on existing critical paradigms, such as the dual nature of Edinburgh and its literature, with its old and new town, its anglification and the demotic, and its enlightenment and the repression of the religious reformation. Uta Hinrichs on our visualisation team presented some of the ways in which we hope to bring the texts to life and provide multiple perspectives on the city and its literature (on which more to follow). For the aim of Palimpsest is to provide a new means to reflect on, excavate, and – indeed – celebrate the sedimentary processes which have given our city its literary shape.

– Miranda Anderson and James Loxley

Update: A version of this post can also be read at the Hestia project blog.


[1] Virginia Woolf. 1986. Literary geography. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. A. McNeillie. Vol. I. London: Hogarth Press, 35.

[2] Virginia Woolf. Mrs Dalloway, 129.