Any place on the surface of the earth can be located in terms of three coordinates:
latitude, longitude and elevation (height above sea level). In most of our work, we
are only concerned with the first two, latitude and longitude, because we don’t (currently)
envisage any rendering or data processing that would make use of elevation.
Traditionally, latitude and longitude were expressed in degrees, like this:
51°30'49.25"N 0° 5'58.42"W
These are the coordinates of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Notice that the longitude coordinate
starts with zero; this is because it is very close to Greenwich, through which the
zero line of longitude, the prime meridian, runs.
In modern GIS systems, latitude and longitude are expressed in decimal numbers, which
look like this:
51.513557 -0.098369
You can see that these are the same basic numbers—latitude measured as distance north
or south from the equator, longitude measured as distance east or west from the prime
meridian—but they’re expressed in a form which enables computers to do math with them
more easily.
Coordinates like this are usually comma-separated, like this:
51.513557,-0.098369
and if elevation is also included, it comes last, like this:
51.513557,-0.098369,0
However, there is a slight wrinkle here: if you use Google systems such as Google
Maps or Google Earth, the coordinates are stored in Google’s XML file format called
KML, and inside that file, the order of latitude and longitude is reversed:
In our work, we usually use Google Earth to find the geolocation of places. Here’s
a screenshot of Google Earth showing St. Paul’s Cathedral:
The first thing we want to do is to make sure that Google Earth will use decimal coordinates
instead of the traditional degrees; that will make our job easier. Click on Tools / Options, and make the selection shown here.
To find the coordinates of this place, the first thing we need to do is to create
a Placemark for it. Click on the Placemark button (
), or on Add / Placemark, and you’ll see a pushpin appear on the map.
Place the pushpin where you want it to go, and you’ll see that the lat/long coordinates
appear in the dialog box, and also at the bottom of the map image. You can copy the
latitude and longitude numbers (without their degree symbol) out of the dialog box, and put them in the TEI file for the location.
Where do you put them in your TEI file? If you open up the file for St. Paul’s Cathedral,
STPA2.xml, you’ll see that it has a <div> in the body that looks like this:
<div type="placeInfo"> <head>St. Paul’s Cathedral</head> <listPlace> <place> <placeName>St. Paul’s Cathedral</placeName> <location> <geo><!-- Geographical coordinates will go here when available. --></geo> </location> </place> </listPlace> </div>
The comment of course tells you where the coordinates should go, like this:
<geo>51.513557,-0.098369</geo>
It is vital that you DO NOT put a space after the comma. You’ll see why this is important below.
For small locations such as individual houses, it is often sufficient to use a single
point to identify the location on the map. However, for larger buildings, streets
and other types of location, we want to provide more detail. Essentially, we want
to draw an outline around the object. We’ll do that now, for St. Paul’s.
An outline is basically just a list of point coordinates, separated by spaces. So
a triangle around the dome of St. Paul’s might be specified like this:
You can see that there are four separate lat-long coordinates, separated by spaces
(showing up as linebreaks). The first one is identical to the last one. This is how
we know that this is a shape or outline of a place, rather than a path or line.
So how do we create shapes in Google Earth, and how do we get their coordinates out?
First, we have to create a polygon, in the same sort of way that we previously created
a placemark. Click on the Add Polygon tool (
), or on Add / Polygon. Now click on a point on the map; then on the next point; then the next; and finally
click back on the first point to complete the polygon:
Now, Google Earth does not helpfully provide you with the output coordinates when
you create a polygon. We have to go through rather a convoluted process to get them.
First, give your new polygon a name in the dialog box, and press OK to save it. You should see it appear in your places list, either under My Places or Temporary Places—it doesn’t matter which:
Now we’re going to save this place as a KML file. Right-click on the place you created,
and choose Save Place As Gap in transcription. Reason: Editorial omission for reasons of length or relevance.
Use only in quotations in born-digital documents.[…]. In the dialog box that pops up, make sure you choose "Kml (*.kml)" as the file type, not kmz. Then give your file a name and save it. This file is an
XML file in Keyhole Markup Language format. Open this file in Oxygen.
Now if you look at the file, you’ll see its <coordinates> element, with the reversed longitude-then-latitude coordinates, and with the elevation
as a third item. We need to convert these coordinates into regular lat-long pairs,
with each pair separated by a comma, and the pairs separated by spaces, to put into
our <geo> element. We could do this manually by copying and pasting, but that’s a bit tedious
and error-prone. Here’s a little trick to help us.
You may have seen, and may even have used, the XPath box at the top left of your Oxygen window. This is a box in which you can enter an
XPath expression, then press Return, and have the XPath run on your document to get
you some results. For instance, with a TEI file, if you put //name in the XPath box and press return, Oxygen will list all the <name> elements in your document.
However, this text box is not very big, and we’ll need to enter a long XPath expression
to do our work, so we’re going to use the XPath Builder window to do that. In Oxygen, click on Window / Show View / XPath/XQuery Builder. This will open a new window in Oxygen, on the right:
Make sure you select "XPath 2.0" in the top left drop-down, and make sure your KML file is the active document on
the left. Now you’ll need to copy/paste the following XPath expression into the window,
as you see it in the screenshot above:
Now press the red triangle button immediately above the expression to run the XPath
against the document. You should see a result appear at the bottom of the Oxygen window:
Now right-click on the result, and choose Show message. In the popup box, you can select and copy the reorganized geo coordinates, and then
paste them into the <geo> element in the TEI file.
Easy, right? Here’s a more realistic example, representing the real outline of St.
Paul’s:
If you’re dealing with a location which is very long and thin, such as a street, you
could define it as a very long, thin polygon, but that’s a lot of unnecessary detail.
It’s probably better to define it as a path. You can do that in exactly the same way
you create a polygon, but using Add / Path or the Path button (
). Paths differ from polygons only in that their final coordinate is not the same
as their initial coordinate.
Cite this page
MLA citation
The University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
HCMC. Encode GIS coordinates of locations.The Map of Early Modern London, edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of Victoria, 26 Jun. 2020, mapoflondon.uvic.ca/geo_deprecated.htm.
Chicago citation
The University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
HCMC. Encode GIS coordinates of locations.The Map of Early Modern London. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Accessed June 26, 2020. https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/geo_deprecated.htm.
APA citation
The University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
HCMC. 2020. Encode GIS coordinates of locations. In J. Jenstad (Ed), The Map of Early Modern London. Victoria: University of Victoria. Retrieved from https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/geo_deprecated.htm.
RIS file (for RefMan, EndNote etc.)
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Database: The Map of Early Modern London
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TEI citation
<bibl type="mla"><author><name ref="#HCMC1" type="org">The University of Victoria
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<reg>HCMC</reg></name></author>. <title level="a">Encode GIS coordinates of locations</title>.
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Programmer, 2018-present. Junior Programmer, 2015-2017. Research Assistant, 2014-2017.
Joey Takeda was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia in the Department
of English (Science and Technology research stream). He completed his BA honours in
English
(with a minor in Women’s Studies) at the University of Victoria in 2016. His primary
research interests included diasporic and indigenous Canadian and American literature,
critical theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities.
Data Manager, 2015-2016. Research Assistant, 2013-2015. Tye completed his undergraduate
honours degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2015.
Director of Pedagogy and Outreach, 2015–present. Associate Project Director, 2015–present.
Assistant Project Director, 2013-2014. MoEML Research Fellow, 2013. Kim McLean-Fiander
comes
to The Map of Early Modern London from the Cultures of Knowledge
digital humanities project at the University of
Oxford, where she was the editor of Early Modern Letters Online, an open-access union
catalogue and editorial interface for correspondence from the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries. She is currently Co-Director of a sister project to EMLO called Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (WEMLO). In the past, she held an internship with the
curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare
Library, completed a doctorate at Oxford on
paratext and early modern women writers, and worked a number of years for the Bodleian Libraries and as a freelance editor.
She has a passion for rare books and manuscripts as social and material artifacts,
and is
interested in the development of digital resources that will improve access to these
materials while ensuring their ongoing preservation and conservation. An avid traveler,
Kim
has always loved both London and maps, and so is particularly delighted to be able
to bring
her early modern scholarly expertise to bear on the MoEML project.
Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director
of The Map of Early Modern London, and PI of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. She has taught at Queen’s University, the Summer
Academy at the Stratford Festival, the University of Windsor, and the University of
Victoria. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge). She has prepared a documentary edition of John Stow’s A
Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If
You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Renaissance and
Reformation,Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies,
Early Modern Literary Studies, Elizabethan
Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance
Criticism, and The Silver Society Journal. Her book
chapters have appeared (or will appear) in Institutional Culture in Early
Modern Society (Brill, 2004), Shakespeare, Language and the Stage,
The Fifth Wall: Approaches to Shakespeare from Criticism, Performance and Theatre
Studies (Arden/Thomson Learning, 2005), Approaches to Teaching
Othello (Modern Language Association, 2005), Performing Maternity
in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007), New Directions in the
Geohumanities: Art, Text, and History at the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2011), Early
Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter, 2016), Teaching Early Modern
English Literature from the Archives (MLA, 2015), Placing Names:
Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana, 2016), Making
Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota, 2017), and Rethinking
Shakespeare’s Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies
(Routledge, 2018).
Janelle Jenstad authored or edited the following items in MoEML’s bibliography:
Jenstad, Janelle. Building a Gazetteer for Early Modern London, 1550-1650.Placing Names. Ed. Merrick Lex Berman, Ruth
Mostern, and Humphrey Southall. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2016. 129-145.
Jenstad, Janelle. The
Burse and the Merchant’s Purse: Coin, Credit, and the Nation in Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody.The
Elizabethan Theatre XV. Ed. C.E. McGee and A.L.
Magnusson. Toronto: P.D. Meany, 2002. 181–202.
Print.
Jenstad, Janelle. The City Cannot Hold You: Social Conversion in the Goldsmith’s
Shop.Early Modern Literary Studies 8.2 (2002): 5.1–26..
Jenstad, Janelle. The Gouldesmythes Storehowse: Early Evidence for
Specialisation.The Silver Society Journal 10 (1998): 40–43.
Jenstad, Janelle. Lying-in Like a Countess: The Lisle Letters, the Cecil
Family, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 373–403. doi:10.1215/10829636–34–2–373.
Jenstad, Janelle. Public
Glory, Private Gilt: The Goldsmiths’ Company and the Spectacle of Punishment.Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society. Ed.
Anne Goldgar and Robert Frost. Leiden: Brill, 2004. 191–217. Print.
Jenstad, Janelle. Smock
Secrets: Birth and Women’s Mysteries on the Early Modern Stage.Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Ed. Katherine
Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 87–99. Print.
Jenstad, Janelle. Using
Early Modern Maps in Literary Studies: Views and Caveats from London.GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place. Ed.
Michael Dear, James Ketchum, Sarah
Luria, and Doug Richardson. London: Routledge, 2011. Print.
Stow, John. A SVRVAY OF
LONDON. Contayning the Originall, Antiquity, Increase, Moderne estate, and description
of that Citie, written in the yeare 1598. by Iohn Stow Citizen of London. Also an
Apologie (or defence) against the opinion of some men, concerning that Citie, the
greatnesse thereof. With an Appendix, containing in Latine, Libellum de situ &
nobilitate Londini: written by William Fitzstephen, in the raigne of Henry the
second. Ed. Janelle Jenstad and
the MoEML Team. MoEML. Transcribed. Web.
Programmer at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC).
Martin ported the MOL project from its original PHP incarnation to a pure eXist database
implementation in the fall of 2011. Since then, he has been lead programmer on the
project
and has also been responsible for maintaining the project schemas. He was a co-applicant
on
MoEML’s 2012 SSHRC Insight Grant.
The University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
HCMC staff have collaborated in the project as programmers and graphics
editors. The mandate of the HCMC is to further research, teaching and
learning in the faculty of Humanities, in particular the fields of Humanities
Computing and Language Learning. We host a research and development office and
manage a room of bookable computer workstations for use by faculty, research
assistants etc. participating in projects supported by the HCMC.
