Hello and happy second month of the New Year! It is high Mardi Gras season here in New Orleans and I feel like everything is happening at the same time.
For new readers: Welcome! You can find all past newsletters in the archive.
Also, OldInsuranceMaps.net is now on Bluesky, come be our 2nd follower! I'll post smaller more frequent updates there, and it will also be something people/orgs can tag when they use OIM for events or research. And, don't forget the discussion forum a great way to connect with other people using OldInsuranceMaps.net.
2024 Stats and Summary
On NYE of 2023 I sent a newsletter with a nice chart of work performed over that year. For 2024, I don't have anything that nice to offer, but here are some numbers from last year:
- New users: 170 (366 total)
- Preparation sessions: 23,235 (31,360 total)
- Georeferencing sessions: 29,402 (41,514 total)
- New Layers: 28,361 (32,362 total)
As you can tell, 2024 far exceeds all work from past years, largely owed to the incredible work of students and staff at the University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab, who seem to be georeferencing 24/7. There have been substantial individual efforts as well though:
hayleox in Cincinnati, OH •
mrileyowens in Cincinnati, OH (you two should talk!) •
ekoparker in Chicago, IL •
sanborn_again1 in Springfield, IL •
mhowell in Noblesville, IN •
tagifford in Schenectady/Scotia, NY •
Gullimapozo in Gary, IN •
lablakely in Waco, Austin, and Georgetown, TX •
cliftonmr in Cleburne, TX •
Pete_Zivkov in Bellingham, WA •
and others!
Plus, of course, a handful of georeference-a-thons (more on those below).
Overall, very roughly, I would estimate we have georeferenced over 1/20th of the entire Library of Congress Sanborn map collection (500k documents in the collection, 38k on OldInsuranceMaps, definitely at least 25k of those processed). Wild!
Georeference-a-thons
Many of these since last newsletter in mid-November!
- Healthy Regions & Policies Lab @ UIUC: For GIS Day last year (Nov. 20th) I took the Amtrak to Champaign to work with my colleagues at the University of Illinois to have a 2-hour event where we georeferenced Champain and Urbana maps from 1915. We even had two guest speakers over Zoom! See this blog post for more details (and action shots!).
- UChicago: Later that day I joined a (very) small group at UChicago, which was kind of perfect because I got to show Parker and Rob around the site in detail. Thanks to Rob for setting this up, on top of all the other GIS Day programming!
- OSU - Also on GIS Day, the team at the Ohio State University Libraries hosted their third georeference-a-thon to date, working on maps of Columbus, great to see such a long-term, continued effort there.
- Morgan State University + UIUC: The following day, "Post-GIS Day", we held a collaborative online event between a group at Morgan State led by Dr. Lawrence Brown, and Dr. Marynia Kolak's Population Geography class at UIUC. Instead of Sanborn maps, we used OldInsuranceMaps.net to georeference FHA Block Data maps from the late 1930's and 1940's. Stay tuned for more about this project in the future.
- Community Mapping Lab @ University of Georgia: Just a few weeks ago, Dr. Jerry Shannon and team at UGA held an event to georeference Athens, GA maps, and you can read more about their work here. Jerry's post on Bluesky also has some action shots!
New features
I'd like to highlight a few new/experimental features I've added in the last couple of months.
- Activity filters: The activity page is the easiest way to see all current and past work that has been carried out on the platform. I've added filters so you can only show work on specific maps, within a date range, or by a certain user.
- Parcel layer snapping: We found that in San Francisco maps, each individual block must be georeferenced individually. This is not only extremely tedious, but also more difficult because you can't use street intersections for control points. So, I set up a system where current parcel lines can be added as a reference layer that you can snap your control points to, which not only speeds things up, but also greatly increases the accuracy of contributed work. I wrote a bit about that on the forum. Have added this feature to a couple other cities, but it is still in development.
- Allmaps and IIIF support: Just last week/weekend, I finally set up endpoints on the site that will return IIIF Georeference Annotations for any layer or mosaic within OldInsuranceMaps.net, which can be used directly in the Allmaps Viewer. You can read more about the work in this pull request (examples included), and you'll now see links to "Open in Allmaps Viewer" within OldInsuranceMaps map overview pages. If you aren't familiar with Allmaps, I strongly encourage you to check it out.
Looking ahead
- Colocate2 at Stanford: Next week I am attending a small "unconference" at the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford. Really looking forward to this and the discussions that will follow, as it is largely focused on institutional georeferencing work, GeoBlacklight, and Allmaps.
- Louisiana History Association Annual Meeting: On Sat. March 15th I'll be participating in a round-table discussion "Mapping the Past: GIS Technology Implementation for Historic Sites" at the annual meeting of the Louisiana History Association, with Elizabeth Williams (Midlo Center at UNO, HistoryForge) and Sarah Waits (archivist at Archdiocese of New Orleans). If you are attending this meeting, please say hello!
- Georeference-a-thon at Rowan University: In April, a group at Rowan University will hold a few events to georeference maps in Gloucester County, NJ. Hopefully I'll be able to pass on another update about this next month.
Thank you!
A big thank you to everyone who continues make this project possible. Especially my colleagues and lab PI Marynia Kolak at UIUC, as well as the team at the URichmond DSL and their partnership with the University of Michigan. Jeff and Minh continue to make OpenHistoricalMap an inviting place to map history (checkout hayleox's work in Cincinnati, or Pete's super detail of New Orleans' French Quarter in 1885), which in turn drives people to OldInsuranceMaps.net where they can create Sanborn base layers to digitize from. Finally, thank you for reading this whole thing!
-- Adam