Exploring and Mapping the Danube: Reading a Hydrographical Map of Buda and Pest (1833)

Abstract

The systematic survey of the waters in Hungary started as a late Enlightenment project in the early nineteenth century when hydrographic maps were produced by a new generation of civil engineers. László Vörös (1790–1860), who studied at the Institutum Geometricum et Hydrotechnicum (founded 1782), the world’s first university-level civil engineering school in Pest-Buda, worked as surveyor, engineer, engraver and map maker for the Danube Mapping Project from 1828. The mapping of the river’s section between Buda and Pest became a priority task because of the regular floods threatening the developing and expanding sister cities. Vörös was commissioned to construct a detailed and accurate map from the available topographic and hydrographic data. His large, detailed and elegant map was lithographed by the author and was published in 1833 with the support of the Bridge Builder’s Union. Vörös’ early thematic map is considered as a milestone in the history of Hungarian cartography and the Széchenyi Chain Bridge (1849), a symbol of the Hungarian capital, is the evidence for its contemporary importance. The interpretation of the map’s rich data content is very difficult, especially for the modern reader, as it was produced by a specific, hydrographic mapping mode, which cannot be fully understood in the topographic paradigm. In this paper we suggest an historical approach to explore the map’s thematic layer and interpret the entire work. By putting this remarkable map into contemporary technical, cultural and social contexts (discourses) its numeric data become meaningful. Modern cartographic visualizations facilitate the interactive exploration of this early map and make it intelligible for the novice or expert map reader. Visualizations of the spatio-temporal database are effective in a cognitively relevant context. In our opinion the successful realization of historical visualizations, beyond knowledge and skills of modern geoinformation technology, require the expertise of the historian of cartography.