Mapping Medieval Chester

The ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ website is continuing to develop, and this post is to let you know about some changes to the interactive digital atlas (high bandwidth version). A while ago, we asked you to send in your photos of medieval locations and features in Chester via Flickr. Thank you so much for your response and the many wonderful photos of medieval sites in Chester today.

These photos have now been added to the digital atlas as an additional layer which you can select. They represent a key new feature, meaning that users can get a sense of how each of these locations appear today. This is especially useful for the international users of this website, who now have the chance to make a ‘virtual visit’ to these places. It’s also very fitting that, as part of a project which focuses on different perspectives on the city, we have this new collection of different views and vantage-points.

Thank you again for contributing to our project and enabling us to extend the resource in such a useful way.

There’s still some final work to be done on the website before it’s complete – and it won’t ever be completely ‘finished’ or static as we aim to add to it and develop it in future, primarily via the blog and discussions here, but also through the addition of further resources. At the moment, we want to do some further work on the digital maps, improving speed, sorting the zoom function (low bandwidth) and allowing users to move from the locations in the atlas (high bandwidth version) to the texts, via the ‘Place’ index. We’re also planning to build an additional map which can be overlaid with Google Maps, to give a better idea of the relation between the medieval and modern city, and to incorporate the layer of photos from Flickr which give snapshots of medieval locations in the city today (more about that in the next post!).

Those of you who joined us at the colloquium in Swansea have heard some discussion of what we aimed to achieve in these digital resources and the kind of functionality we’ve tried to develop. I wanted to include some reflections here on the methods and processes which we brought to the website.

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