Crowdsourced Georeferencing Sanborn Maps
Thesis paper: "Creating a Public Space for Georeferencing Sanborn Maps: A Louisiana Case Study"
For my Geography MS thesis at Louisiana State University I put together an open platform that allows anyone to georeference historical fire insurance maps that are held in the Library of Congress digital Sanborn collection. There are over 500,000 scanned documents in this collection, which cover 10,000+ communities in the US.
The goal of this project is to create a space in which the public can help transform scanned maps into more reusable spatial layers, while also facilitating engagement with those maps. For the beta release, only maps of cities in Louisiana are available.
Presentations
"Creating a Public Space for Georeferencing Sanborn Maps" -- NACIS 2021 - OKC
"Extending GeoNode to Support Historical Map Georeferencing" -- GeoNode Virtual Summit - 2020
Online Historical Map Georeferencer (OHMG) ~ slides
While creating oldinsurancemaps.net, I designed the georeferencing components as a stand-alone app that can ostensibly be added to any GeoNode installation. Eventually, I would like to host a generic example of this plugin, for demo purposes. Adding document georeferencing capabilities to GeoNode would greatly expand the types of use cases that the system would support.
For example, a municipal government may implement GeoNode as their geospatial data hub, and then add the georeferencing plugin to the installation so that planners (or members of the public) could upload historical surveys or city maps, georeference them, and then integrate these layers into public facing web maps. Spatial data could also be directly digitized into layers managed by GeoNode.
Historical Map Georeferencing
I've been georeferencing historical maps for fun and for work for a number of years. It is the focus of my current master's thesis research, specifically, new ideas for how to best crowdsource the work for large institutional collections.
Presentations
GeoNode Summit 2020 - slides
In December 2020 I gave a presentation about crowdsourced georeferencing at the GeoNode Summit virtual meeting. I outlined my MS thesis project to build browser-based map georeferencing capabilities into GeoNode.
QGIS North America 2020 - slides
In July 2020 I presented at the QGIS North America virtual meeting about how I use GIMP to edit georeferenced historical maps.
