Antirubbersheeter
Geocode your data using a Leaflet-friendly basemap created from your non-Mercator / fictional / etc. map.
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About the Antirubbersheeter
The Antirubbersheeter exists in implicit critique of the tendency to “georectify” maps to fit into the Web Mercator projection, as though that’s the “correct,” in some way, a “faulty” map. As Johanna Drucker reminds us, “the greater intellectual challenge is to create spatial representations without referencing a pre-existing ground.”1 Doing so turns space into a surface, “continuous and given,” as Doreen Massey notes.2
Instead, we should follow Massey’s lead and remember that space is as a place always “under construction,” and, as such, as one where taking a representaion of space and “rectifying” it does violence to the way the creators of the representation chose to distribute items in space.3
Hence the Antirubbersheeter ( @muziejus/antirubbersheeter), which aims to provide the usability of a web framework like Leaflet but letting the representation itself determine its coordinate scheme. Of course, that scheme remains Cartesian, but computers have limitations.
The Antirubbersheeter lets you upload an image, which is subsequently copied over to Imgur, which subsequently hosts the image. Additionally, you add a comma-separated list of places you would like to locate on the map and start the geocoder.
The page now becomes a familiar Leaflet map, but with your image in the center. Here, you are prompted to place markers for each place you included in your earlier list. Once all the places have been recorded (click to place a marker, click the button to advance), a modal will open with your dataset presented in JSON. You should copy and save that object for later use in your own Leaflet projects, or whatever.
See the GitHub README if you want to build your dataset locally on your computer and not use Imgur.
Package Mode Enabled
Your file was above 10mb in size. This isn’t a problem—after all, this tool is best served on large, high-quality scans. But it does mean things will work a bit differently.
Leaflet will have trouble with an image that large, so instead of doing everything automatically for you right away, the Antirubbersheeter will break up your image into tiles, package the tiles up with some boilerplate code into a zipfile, and upload it all to WeTransfer, where you can download the zipfile.
Once you unpack the zipfile on your computer, there will be a file in
the antirubbersheeter folder called index.html. Double-click on
that, and your image should load as a tiled map in your browser.
We’ll repeat these instructions at the end of the process, which could take a few minutes.