I've been wanting to do this for a while, but finally got the time and tools to test it out. It's very time and server bandwidth consuming, but the results are well worth it I think.
Note that you can control the transparency with the black slider at the top right of the map.
http://www.metromapper.org/historic/testcherokee.php
Take a look and let me know what you think. I'd love to do this with all of their maps across the whole city, but here is what we'd need:
1. Access to all the high res images in the UofL archive (6 for 1876, 30 for 1884, and 112 for 1913)Anyone know how to achieve these goals?
2. Stitch them all together for each year into 3 big images (easily 100,000s of pixels across)
3. Convert them into map overlays
4. Host and serve them out to the public
#1 would need to be through UofL's involvement.
We could do #2 also but would prefer not to due to the time involved and the hardware requirements to handle the images smoothly.
Metro Mapper can do #3 (it's what we're good at :).
And #4 we can do, but it is mildly expensive. The sample map contains about 150MB of image data overlays, so the final ones would be over 100GB I bet. Plus there is considerable bandwidth involved in serving them to users. I'd need payment or sponsorship of the maps. Or maybe UofL would host them after the work was done.