[Historic] Hello list

[Matt Knutzen]

Hi all,

I'm Matt Knutzen, Geospatial Librarian at the NYPL. We're a collection of about 1/2 million sheets, 24k books and atlases and a growing collection of digitized historical maps (25,000 by the end of 2013), mostly of NYC. Together with our friends at EntropyFree (now Topomancy), we've pushed the development of the Map Warper and Digitizer (tracer), documented the application, secured NEH funding to run a whole  bunch of our maps through the scan/warp/transcribe process, and are now building a historical gazetteer of NYC using a hodgepodge of data from outside NYPL and transcribed from our own collections (eg 57,000 building footprints with historical addressing from 1852). The hope is to flesh this out to a full blown reference work for the research of historical geography and ultimately put it to use in the service of historical geocoding, geoparsing and the like.

I've known for some time that there's great opportunity to engage a wider, cartographically inclined community and openstreetmap has always seemed a natural fit. To that effect, Topomancy have enabled our maps to work in OSM editors. Many questions articulated here remain: as to the relation historic data has to current OSM data, the modeling of time, the policy around the immediate historical nature of OSM data, and how that data is tracked, stored, archived, preserved.

I'm very happy and grateful (thanks Mikel) we're convening this list, but know we could benefit even more by meeting up in person (an OHM gathering).  I can offer meeting space at the NYPL and am happy to offer a hand in planning and logistics related to bringing folks together. Also, since some of this conversation will be happening at SOTM, it would be excellent if those facilitating/attending there could give a synopsis when they return.

Talk to you all soon,


Matt