Palestine Open Maps

The problem Palestine Open Maps set out to solve was not scarcity but form. The 1940s Survey of Palestine sheets — produced by a British Mandate institution, mapping the territory at scales up to 1:20,000, showing population centres, roads, topography and property boundaries — had already entered the public domain and become available in digital form. But they exist as hundreds of separate sheets with no means to search or navigate them, which made them, in practice, unusable for anyone without a map library and a great deal of time. The platform combines them into seamless layers, adds other historical layers running from the 1870s to the 1950s, and joins them to data.

That join is what turns it from a scanned map into a research instrument. Population figures for over two thousand places, past and present, are attached to the map — drawn from the 1945 Village Statistics and other sources — so a place name can be queried rather than merely found. The interface offers a split-screen mode for viewing past and present side by side, a 3D mode showing the topography, and an overlay mode that puts historical features on present-day maps: the single fastest way to demonstrate what stands today on the site of a destroyed village. Individual historical sheets can be downloaded.

The credits are a map of the field in themselves. The project was initiated at Impact Data Lab, a workshop organised by Visualizing Palestine and Columbia University Studio-X Amman in March 2018, and is developed by Visualizing Palestine; the development team includes Ahmad Barclay and Majd Al-Shihabi, the latter supported by the Creative Commons Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship. The platform’s own credits note that it would not have been possible without data gathered and digitised over many years by Dr Salman Abu Sitta of the Palestine Land Society, by PalestineRemembered, and by Zochrot. The sheets themselves came from sources including the David Rumsey Map Collection, the Australian national library and the Israeli national library.

The site quotes Abu Sitta on why the maps exist at all: few countries have had surveying and mapping play so large a role in their history, and those who coveted Palestine “wanted to know its physical and historical characteristics as a prelude to conquering the land.” The colonial survey is now the most detailed surviving evidence of what was destroyed — which is the reversal this platform performs.

Sources

• About — Palestine Open Maps
• Palestine Open Maps — home and map explorer