Tracing the evolution of education through street maps and town plans: educational institutions in the maps of Edinburgh during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Abstract

In recent years, visual records have come to be seen as important sources of information in the study of education and its history. However, most of the images used in this way simply provide a glimpse – though admittedly a precise one – of only one moment in the educational process. Graphic verisimilitude is not only to be found in these images; it might also be found in iconographic and symbolic representations that indicate not just the existence of the facts and phenomena represented, but also their significance. An example of this might be the study of the graphic and textual references to educational institutions that appear in maps. It is with the aim of discovering what these primary sources – maps and street plans – can teach us that we have carried out this study of the cartography of the city of Edinburgh in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period that saw great changes in both the urban geography of the city and in education. This article describes the rationale, processes and results of this study.