Hello everyone, and welcome to a characteristically long-overdue newsletter. Much to report.
I’m very excited to announce that beginning this month, a large team of University of Richmond students is now using OldInsuranceMaps.net for a massive georeferencing effort led by Rob Nelson and Riley Champine at the Digital Scholarship Lab. The work will be a foundational component of an NIH grant undertaken through a partnership between the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, the Richmond DSL, and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. Here's the ISR press release for more info.
What this means for OldInsuranceMaps.net is pretty incredible: the University of Michigan is now a funder of the project, and, perhaps more excitingly, the students are already making progress on cities like Birmingham, Miami, Sacramento, and many others.. Also, my new(ish) full-time position at the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, will allow a bit of time to be put toward the effort, so my heartflet thanks to everyone that is making this possible!
A shoutout again to Jeff Meyer at OpenHistoricalMap for including me in his presentation at SOTMUS in Richmond--it's how this new collaboration came about. That presentation video is now on YouTube.
The folks behind Soar got in touch earlier this summer with an interest in getting mosaics from OldInsuranceMaps into their digital atlas, and I've pursued this because it is a such a good opportunity to get these maps in front of more people, and perhaps even drive some georeferencing activity as well.
There will be more to say about the Soar in coming weeks, but in the meantime checkout the new OldInsuranceMaps (.net) account where I've been trying out some mosaic uploads. Soar offers nice features like the ability to bookmark, comment on, and even embed the maps in other web pages, and they've recently released a QGIS plugin, which you can use to search and use any maps in their platform. Many new ways to engage with these maps.
A couple of months ago Kevin Haywood, a cartographer from Macon, Georgia got in touch, (donated!), and requested the addition of a few volumes. Well, now you can explore Macon in 1908, Milledgeville (6 years of coverage), and Forsyth in 1920! The work was a hit with a local history groups in the area, which is a category of people I've had in mind from the beginning--so happy to see this kind of interest. Thanks Kevin, and to anyone reading from Georgia, check out his trail maps next time you go adventuring!
An exceptionally belated thank you to Eliot, Rick, Hoon, and Nicole who came out to the last georeference-a-thon we had at Second Line Brewing, yes, all the way back in June :/. We continued to work on New Orleans 1896 vol. 1, and since then Elizabeth at HistoryForge has finished it up. It looks great. She and I are working now to integrate that mosaic into the Southeast Louisiana HistoryForge (more news on that to come).
As for future georeference-a-thons, some folks have already approached me about supporting an event for GIS day (November 15th, in case you weren't aware of this holiday). If an event on that day interests people in the New Orleans area, please get in touch! Maybe we will have simultaneous events in multiple locations...
As usual, there are a few developments to the platform itself that I'd like to highlight:
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That's all for now! Thanks for your interest, and as always, you can reply directly to this email with questions or feedback.
Adam
p.s. I would love help with putting together this newsletter on a more regular basis (maybe a recent work highlights section??) and generally improving it. Let me know if you have free time and would be interested in helping out.