Catching up with a quick update
Hello all! Writing to tell you about a few things that have happened in the last few months, and some upcoming news.
For new readers: Welcome! You can find all past newsletters in the archive. You can also respond directly to this email to say hello, and you'll find an unsubscribe link below.
Online presentation for I-GUIDE VCO series, tomorrow!
Wednesday 7/16, 11am US Central Time -- registration linkApologies for the late notice. Tomorrow I'll be giving an online presentation as part of I-GUIDE's Virtual Consulting Office showcase series. I'm really looking forward to this, as I'll be able to get into some of the more technical details of the platform, and there should be plenty of time for Q&A as well. Registration is free and open to everyone! Big thank you to Alex Michels for organizing these talks.
Also, next week I'll be co-presenting in the same forum with my colleagues from the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab about our work on the SDOH & Place Data Discovery application. Come to that one too for something completely different!
Results of a past georeference-a-thon
This past April, Rowan University's Center for Digital Humanities Research hosted the largest georeferencing event that the site has facilitated to date. Over the course of an afternoon, 50 new people made accounts and georeferenced over 250 layers, covering a number of towns around Glassboro, New Jersey. It really had the server churning, slowed things down a bit for sure, but nothing broke. Read more about it in the Whit.
Website content reshuffle and new Blog
I've accumulated content about OldInsuranceMaps.net in a few different places, and web analytics show that no one really looks at it. So, a couple weeks ago I bribed my wife with pizza and we spent some time figuring out how to reorganize. I've done my best to see these changes through over the last couple of weekends, and they aren't complete, but...
- New Blog! blog.oldinsurancemaps.net I'll be transferring all kinds of pieces from different places into this blog, and it'll be the best place to stay up-to-date on the project and see how it's developed over time. I put a lot of entries in already (back-posting as if I'd been writing in it for years), and will continue to do that until I can't think of anything more to add. Let me know if you have suggestions! (This newsletter isn't going away though.)
- More content on the main website A while ago I created about.oldinsurancemaps.net with documentation, background, and guides on it, but that content has remained somewhat obscure and much of it would be better housed directly within the main website itself. So, with a bit of an update to the main site's structure, I'm beginning to transfer it over and that site will eventually go away. Still a work in progress, but finally on the way.
And a final tech note...
OldInsuranceMaps.net now stores all of its geotiffs in S3 object storage! In other words, there is a lot more space for new maps. This is a backend change that really opens the door for future work... Not a difference you would notice from looking at the website, but for more information you can checkout this blog post (on the new blog!).
That's all for now, hope to see some of you tomorrow morning,
Adam