Od tištěného atlasu k webovému mapovému portálu. Úvahy nad přípravou digitálních historiografických map

Abstract

The wider Central European region and the Czech lands have, as the proverbial “crossroads of European history”, always been the subject of scholarly research by historians. Český historický atlas. Kapitoly z dějin 20. století [Czech Historical Atlas. Chapters from the History of the 20th Century], published in print in 2019, is yet another Czech historiographic publication in this vein, presenting selected historical events of the Czech lands and the wider related area in the 20th century. It is an important follow-up to the Akademický atlas českých dějin [Academic Atlas of Czech History], published in 2014. The new atlas follows the trend of making full use of the Internet, web services, HTML5 and other digital technologies in cartographic production. It is accompanied by a web map portal, work on which is an extension of the focus of the Czech Academy of Sciences’ Institute of History. The aim of the portal is not to be an exhaustive encyclopaedia of historical events, but to provide a summary of interesting topics discussed within Czech historical research in the last few decades that have not yet been fully captured cartographically, as a number of new themes and especially new perspectives on history have appeared since the end of the communist era. This paper discusses the issue of transferring existing maps prepared for printed atlases into the web environment, including the design of the entire web portal containing map applications and other related content. It describes the basic steps of the transfer process and explores in detail the difficulties arising in it, especially the suitability and compatibility of the selected web technology. It also pays attention to the basic requirements of the electronic portal as such, the need to formalise the structure, and the presentation of historical information through a story, i.e. the need to link maps to other information. Technical solutions and related issues are the subject of the demonstration part of the paper, which also explores the content of the web atlas and its target audience. In general, web map portals seem to provide a trajectory along which historiographic maps are likely to develop in the future.