A project commissioned by the director of Tomory Lajos Museum. The aim of the project was to create a website for the museum, which could be used as auxiliary material for educational programmes within the museum. The project’s main aim was to present the history of the 18th district through multiple visualisation websites. The site gives home to six interactive maps: base maps of the district; streets and squares of the district; historical maps; home and landowners in the district in 1916; statues of the district; educational institutions of the district.
The base map compiles nine different layers of the district and presents it to the visitor on an interactive platform, made in Foursquare Studio (previously known as Unfolded.ai). The layers are: vectorised elevation; contour lined elevation; built area; land borders; streets; buildings; building height; 1916 addresses; population change between 2000 and 2020.
The streets and squares page was commissioned after a conference presentation in Budapest City Archives about the Budapest Street Names project. The director of Tomory Lajos Museum attended the conference and proposed the idea of a project of a similar style to the Street Names project, with the use of scrollytelling to present the history of the 18th district. The page was not a technical innovation, as it used the same wireframe as previous map-based scrollytelling sites, with Javascript and Mapbox GL JS.
The historical maps page was a new challenge, as it required georeferencing multiple historical raster maps of the district. These maps were provided to us by the museum. The georeferencing was done in QGIS. The site allows the user to choose from multiple historical maps from 1890 to 1993. This can be combined with a stylized base map or a satellite view. The opacity of the historical map can be changed to help better comparison between then and now.
The land ownership of 1916 page was similar to the streets and squares page. The data was already available thanks to the employees of the museum. The final database allowed us to make a dot map. We used the scrollytelling method to tell the story of the biggest landowners of 1916.
The statues page is another dot map made in Mapbox GL JS. The extra feat here is the combined filter, that allows users to apply multiple filter selections and color tamplates.
The educational institute page is yet another scrollytelling page showing the historical change of these insitutions (schools and kindergartens). The extra feat here is that at a certain zoom level, the dot map transforms into a 3d polygon map, where each colored dot turns into a colored 3d building. The elevation of the 3d buildings are also close to reality.
Click here to access the full project.
Continuous publication between May 2022 and January 2023.
Szabó Krisztián 