Knowledge

The waterways and high seas in and around Denmark have been more or less systematically mapped since the renaissance. However, old naval and maritime charts are rarely the precise instruments of navigation and orientation we are used to, and often many other aspects of the coastline are included in the maps. These old maps also do not concur to contemporary navigational grids and coordinate systems which makes comparisons with modern information difficult.

In this video, Associate Professor Thomas T. Nielsen (Roskilde University) will explain about a project where the Maritime Museum of Denmark, The Royal Danish Library and RUC collaborated on scanning, geometrically rectifying and finally publishing old naval charts at historiskatlas.dk.

The session was developed in collaboration with MARLOG.