MapReader - Railspace and Buildings Datasets Viewer
Further Information
This viewer displays selected data created using the MapReader tool, produced by the Living with Machines project. MapReader is an end-to-end computer vision (CV) pipeline for exploring and analyzing images at scale, which is especially well suited to series maps such as the Ordnance Survey collections held by the National Library of Scotland.
Researchers on Living with Machines experimented with the Six-inch to the Mile, 1888-1914 maps of England, Scotland, and Wales, to look for railway infrastructure and buildings.
What the viewer shows are the outputs of a machine-learning pipeline for predicting the location of these two, distinct map features across the entire collection. This remains an experimental work-in-progress, which is described in more detail in this technical publication (GeoHumanities workshop in SIGSPATIAL 2022) as well as in this historical article (Journal of Victorian Culture, 2021).
This viewer makes use of the following two output files, which are also available on the NLS Data Foundry:
- railspace or rail infrastructure.. 487,360 point records from the
pred_01_03_all.csvfile - buildings. 1,762,152 point records from the
pred_02_all.csvfile