My wife, as part of her research work, wants to put together a city map showing where particular features and businesses are located.
The area under consideration is the lower half of Manhattan, and she is a historian so the time period is the middle of the nineteenth century. She wants to be able to map things like shops, theaters, boarding houses, etc.
She says that she would ideally like to map these features on top of a historic map, but that the street geography of Manhattan has changed little enough that a modern map would be acceptable, if that would make things easier.
My first suggestion, obviously, was Google maps, but she said she would prefer something where she doesn’t need to be connected to the internet, and where she can just have the map on her own computer. She suggested perhaps even just using a large image in Photoshop, and then using layers to put in the different locations.
I said i’d look around and see if there was something that might do the job better, and now i’m coming to Dopers for help. Obviously, something like ArcGIS would work, but i don’t think we want anything so complicated, or with such a big learning curve.
Any suggestions?