Some time I was questioning why do we/I need to know history, the history of family, nation, humanity. Why we always look back? And once I found - people, indeed society, has such thing as collective historical memory, that is built in our heads from our experiences as a group by sharing and it talks us about our culture and identity. The concept is quite clearly explained in wikipedia (Collective memory), as well as there is a free document from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut to read (Study of historical memory).
We do not notice that most of the historical memory we have is a collective, it's a shared memory - not collected empirically. What is interesting that with growing society people are searching for more and more earlier and broader historical memory. We can see that even from mass-media production, which from being interested in fantastic movies some decades ago are now presenting the documentaries, probably that is what the society is asking for - the collective history to share. And it is not just the trend of media information, I feel it is the trend in geographical information. For the places, spaces with great amount of geographical information that is well represented (mainly visualized), the historical geographical information demand is raised more and more often. It's all about the curiosity and about the desire of collective historical memory.
The historical geographical information representation is a part of reconstruction process, it's a spatial reconstruction process. Not long time ago, there was a movie made by Deutsche Welle about the reconstruction of the Berlin wall - I wrote about in the previous post. Now, the new project is published and presented for the society - the Early Washington Visualization done by Image Research Center (IRC).
The project can be found and is fully described on http://visualizingdc.com/
But let's have a look at the geographical/cartographical side of this project.
