Location, location, location: Mapit1418

August 31st 2009

During History Week (October 17 until October 25 2009) Knowledgeland and the National Archive will present the website MapIt1418. “War and Peace” is the theme of the week and this initiative corresponds nicely to it: the site gives access to an exceptional selection of First World War photo material from the National Archive. On this site special attention is given to photos from the Netherlands during the time of war, many of which have never been displayed before.

It is often unknown where these photographs were taken at that time. With this initiative KL and the National Archive still want to add the correct geographical locations to the photographs through crowdsourcing. Website visitors can do this by means of a map from Open Street Map (www.openstreetmap.org), the open source alternative for Google Maps, for example. Apart from that visitors can add their own present-day photographs of the locations to the site, thereby creating an intriguing comparison between then and now!

The public launch of the website will take place during History Night, the festive closing ceremony of History Week on October 24 2009 in hotel Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam. Especially for that event, Knowledgeland and the National Archive developed a unique extension of the website in collaboration with Geodan (www.geodan.nl): a game on the Surface Table of Microsoft, with which visitors of the Night can discover the collection together and get to know more about the locations. 


MapIt1418 is an initiative of the National Archive and Knowledgeland and is being developed within the framework of the project Images for the Future.