If there’s one thing that Bath certainly isn’t short on its heritage. In fact the whole of the B&NES area has an amazing history and cultural heritage. As the week of the Bath Digital Festival is also Heritage Open Week that seemed like an opportunity to go a bit further and create something really unique for people to play with.

Hackday 2.1 is subtitled “past, present, and future” and we’ve been working hard to populate the Heritage category in the data store with some interesting datasets. We’ve already loaded data on listed buildings and commemorative plaques, as well as lists of books published in Bath, written about Bath, or set in Bath for you to explore.

But we’ve also been working on taking some historical maps of Bath, provided by B&NES and the British Library and have been giving them a bit of digital flair. Here’s a short video that shows what we’ve been able to produce so far:

We’re aiming to get these mapping layers published during Heritage week so that anyone — not just hackers — can use it to explore the city in an entirely new way. To our knowledge this is the first time that these maps have been published interactively.

We’re also hoping that they might provide the basis for some interesting projects during the hack day, providing a fresh way to visualise some of the historical data about the city.

Watch this space for an update next week which will include a complete list of all of the maps we’ll be making available and how to use them.

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