Presenting tomorrow at Code4Lib! Details in Newsletter: Winter (pt 2): https://blog.oldinsurancemaps.net/2026/03/02/newsletter-winter-pt/

This is so incredibly fun to explore

🐟🦈 tracking students: @actnetwork.bsky.social and @maracoos.bsky.social are accepting applications for their Student Conference Award through 9 March: $1k for travel to a conference of your choosing. Apply today (or tomorrow, just before March 9th)! theactnetwork.com/student-conf...

Thanks @willpooley.bsky.social for this generous reading - @danielwilson.bsky.social @ruthahnert.bsky.social & I are so glad this is resonating with historians!

Wrote a little thing about work my class is doing this semester in a historically Black cemetery in town. Yet major map providers don't even show the cemetery space on their maps. Our work is trying to fill that cartographic void. www.communitymappinglab.org/blog/the-abs...

Come join us today!

Nice workshop on georeferencing coming up Jan 31 w/ @oldinsurancemaps.net @openhistoricalmap.org & more as a part of the @osmus.bsky.social virtual conference - openstreetmap.us/events/mappi...

🎉🎉

@evolvingwild.evolving-hockey.com This is very cool! ictnews.org/news/histori...

Wrote an overview of a feature in OldInsuranceMaps.net, something I hope to do more of in the coming year. There are a lot of novel capabilities just kind of buried in the app at this point. Also I finally have a good method for efficiently making animated gifs. This bodes well for future posts.....

We're 12 followers away from 10k followers. I want people to like us. Get us to 10k followers and I'll post that Lil B song I always used to do on the other site when we'd reach round-number follower tiers.

Took the bus today, stopped in at my favorite boutique oil refinery

From some recent activity, here's a rare but good example (from Worcester Mass.) of where the Thin Plate Spline transformation makes sense for #georeferencing #sanborn maps. Curved roads out in space are sometimes drawn without good scale and need extra distortion oldinsurancemaps.net/layer/72727

If you are in the New Orleans area, come to one of our upcoming Georeference-a-thons at Second Line Brewing! Tuesday evenings, the 16th and 23rd. RSVP form here: tiny.cc/georef-2025. We'll be focusing on 1895 Duncan Plaza area and hearing from archaeologists who did work there over the summer.

This started as a "here's a link to a recent talk recording" but I ended up repurposing some slides and writing more about how the warping process works within the system.

Are there any options for running a serverless patterned STAC endpoint? Or even better, a fully static STAC-metadata store that requires the client to do the filtering? I see that https://github.com/stac-utils/stac-fastapi can use a parquet storage as its backend, which seems like it could get […]

I'll be doing a nice long talk this Wednesday morning at 11am central time, open to everyone! Sign up through the link.

1895 Hull-House wage and nationality maps, welcome to your forever home!

Chipped away at this over the last couple weeks, 425gb off the server and up in the air. Really throws the door open for future possibilities...

amtrak’s marketing team gets it

📣 The Healthy Regions & Policies Lab is looking for a Postdoctoral Scholar for the 2025-26 academic year! 🧑‍🎓 Learn more about position compensation, benefits, and requirements here: healthyregions.org/2025/06/06/p... 📅 Apply by 11:59 PM CDT on Tuesday, July 1st, 2025

The six-year Sanborn copyright case has been settled! Started with EDR (now LightBox) suing ERIS and right away ERIS counter-sued with a lot of claims. Looks like ERIS came up big in the settlement with a valid license to distribute all copyrighted Sanborn maps: www.businesswire.com/news/home/20....

I'm on a mission to find indie game developers using OpenStreetMap! We want to feature their work at @osmus.bsky.social. How can I connect with this community?

Celebrating our partners @ UChicago Libraries and @dsi-uchicago.bsky.social #ittakesavillage www.datarescueproject.org/uchicagos-da...

If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.

We spent an entire paddling season researching and paddling across the Twin Cities to create this guide. The Star Tribune has never put out a guide this comprehensive. Get out on the water, people. It's really the best thing you can do this summer. www.startribune.com/canoe-kayak-...

🚀 The SDOH & Place Project Data Discovery App Now LIVE! 📊🌍 To make finding #SDOH and place data easier, we present the SDOH & Place Data Discovery platform. Check out our Alpha release and provide feedback as we refine over the next few months. View the app live here: sdohplace.org/search

DataLumos is an ICPSR archive for valuable government data resources. ICPSR has a long commitment to safekeeping and disseminating US government and other social science data. Learn more at datalumos.org. #DataPreservation #OpenData #SocialScience

We plan to use @overturemaps.bsky.social Places data as reference layers in a soon-to-be-released web application, and I would love to link to more documentation about (and gain a better understanding of) the "confidence" field. Any pointers on where to look, beyond the official docs? #gischat

#maplibrejs afficionados: Any way around this messy labeling? (numbers 32, 62, and 50) I'm thinking there isn't, as the label layer is on top of the cluster layer, and you can actually see the exact same behavior in the official docs example: maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-...

🚀 Data Discovery App 📊🔍 Easily explore datasets with structured metadata! To stay up-to-date, keep an eye on our socials, or sign up to our newsletter: go.illinois.edu/SDOH-SUBSCRIBE #MetadataMatters #DataDiscovery #SDOH #OpenData #FoodAccess #PublicHealth #CommunityPlanning

Introducing the SDOH & Place Data Discovery App—helping users access key SDOH and health equity data from sources like CDC, PLACES, and Tree Canopy. 🚀 Alpha release coming soon! Stay updated via our socials or newsletter.https://go.illinois.edu/SDOH-SUBSCRIBE #SDOH #PublicHealth #HealthEquity #Data

Newsletter finally out: oldinsurancemaps.net/news/2024-in..., also give a follow to the new account here: @oldinsurancemaps.net !

Thanks to @mradamcox.bsky.social for helping us set this up. Oldinsurancemaps.net is a easy platform for georeferencing with a group, especially those with minimal GIS experience.

Missed our data preservation event yesterday? We've uploaded the entire discussion on our YouTube channel:

First Community Mapping Lab mapathon of the year! Digitizing Sanborn maps for Athens in 1918 for our historical work.

Map-a-thon on OldInsuranceMaps.net going on right now by a group at UGA, georeferencing Athens, GA in 1918. It's fun to watch as the mosaic comes together: oldinsurancemaps.net/map/sanborn0... #sanbornmaps #crowdsource #georeferencing

For those interested in the Data Rescue Tracker, keep in mind that we need to know/hear from you to be able to track where data is going. That's why we have a submission form. Let us know what you have and submit it! baserow.datarescueproject.org/form/dGIFuHv...

Latoya Gray-Sparks gave an excellent (and heartbreaking) talk about Urban Renewal history in #RVA tonight. RPL Memory Lab was a great host and put together these fantastic Sanborn map displays with monopoly pieces to show homes razed for Gilpin Court, I-95, and the downtown expressway.

Worried about losing access to US federal data that may go off-line, or already is? You’re not alone—but duplication isn’t the answer. Many ongoing efforts have already archived key datasets and many more are ongoing. Check out these existing resources and, if you can, support their work. 🧵

Remember that our tax dollars paid for this data. It is our data. The government is the people. Every dataset removed is theft. #gischat

Good graphic from Pew on what the federal workforce actually looks like. “insurance company with an army” indeed

Finally wrote up a blog post about the georeference-a-thon we held at UIUC last November for GIS day: healthyregions.org/2025/01/31/g.... We had a great turnout, especially from different parts of campus outside the geog dept. #sanbornmaps #georeferencing #crowdsourcing #OldInsuranceMaps

Oh this is just *delightful*: for the opening of his documentary on the history of music on SNL, Questlove produced “a high-speed, six-minute DJ mix of SNL music highlights”. So good you’ll want to watch it way more than just once. [kottke.org]

Update thread: New website! New logo (made of tiles!) protomaps.com New docs on using the hosted Protomaps tiles API protomaps.com/api New FAQ with questions like: How is @protomaps.com different from #openstreetmap ? protomaps.com/about

Explore 1952 #Baltimore on Old Insurance Maps: oldinsurancemaps.net/viewer/balti...