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The Imperiia Project: a spatial history of the Russian Empire

Wild Things

What can you learn from a map that is 300 years old and written in a language you (most likely) cannot read?

The map in question was made in Siberia. It shows one of the coldest, most remote parts of what was the Russian Empire. The only copy ever made is now in Houghton Library in Cambridge and you can flip through every page of the full atlas by clicking here.

The official name of the map is "Map of the town of Mangazeya and surrounding area," but we prefer to think of it as the "Wild Things" map. It won't take you long to figure out why. All maps tell stories, but this particular map never stops telling them - stories about fires and polar bears and dogsleds and more.

When you are ready to begin, click here.

(Don't worry if you can't read the words. To have fun with this map, all you need is your imagination and a mouse - touchscreens won't work.)

If you would like to download a PDF of the map, you can do so here.

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Siberian Sketchbook 9 a geospatial archive of seventeenth-century Siberia image_header 2024-03-11T10:48:12-04:00
We are building a geospatial archive seventeenth-century Siberia. The source of this archive-under-construction is a gorgeous manuscript atlas produced in 1696 and now housed in Harvard’s Houghton Library. The 163 maps Semyon Remezov created and bound into his Khorograficheskaya Kniga (Chrorographic Sketchbook) describe feature topography, vegetation, mineral deposits, the prevalence of wildlife, and details about trade routes and travel conditions. If you want to locate poisonous fruit, lucrative hunting grounds, or the best route over winter ice, Remezov's atlas - and the database we are building from it - is for you.
Why we are excited (and why you should be)
- We want to compare the river systems and land use patterns of the past to those of the present. However, forcing satellite-generated data to play nicely with hand-painted descriptions of oxbows isn’t easy. We are developing a strategy that will bridge the gap between cartographic methods.
- Our method for grid-based feature extraction will be useful to anyone working with map series describing any part of the world.
- Sometimes, maps aren’t enough. This project demonstrates the complementary power of geospatial, thematic, and network visualization.
Take a look behind the curtain
Visualizing the contents of 163 maps describing 24 major rivers (along with hundreds of others) spanning half a continent in one visual plane is no easy task. And did we mention that the maps vary constantly in scale, projection, and orientation?
In an effort to tame this cartographic beast, we harnessed the power of the drafting grid Remezov used to compile his maps. By breaking each sheet into a series of grid squares we can preserve the sequential logic of the maps and allow researchers to filter and query. To get a sense of how this works, explore this visualization of the 12 maps of the Tobol River. Use the folio (i.e. map) selector on the left to see how the distribution of features, graphic elements (including symbols and color variation), and text elements (including placenames and notes) vary.

See what you can make of these maps: choose your own adventure:

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Not quite the same