If you’re not familiar with them, Sanborn maps are old fire insurance maps that show with great detail the block-by-block history of over 13,000 US towns and cities.

I’m moving to New Orleans this summer after 20 years in San Francisco, and the first thing I did was look up our new (125 year old) place there on Sanborn maps. That required pulling a research request, whizzing through microfilm, and printing out sheets–exactly how I did it 20 years ago at SFPL. In so doing, I’ve realized just how much I’ve taken for granted the passionate historical map community in the Bay Area and all the work that has gone in to make this public domain content freely available, discoverable, and reusable.

In this session, I’d like to build on the past work of the Maptcha crew and many other people to help geolocate SF Sanborn maps and also prototype a US-wide project using Historypin to help people make Sanborn maps more discoverable in their own town or city.

It’d be great to get a few interested people of differing technical skills (no coding required easy- some coding intermediate) to work on this for a session and see how far we can get.

After a long hiatus, THATCamp Bay Area is back for one day only, April 16, 2016, in a special co-located event together with the California Preservation Conference and located at the Presidio Trust Design Lab in the Presidio, San Francisco. We’re branding this one as THATCamp Historic Places. This fun, informal, and participatory event gathers humanists and technologists from all skill levels and backgrounds. As an “unconference,” participants bring their own session ideas and collaborate in real-time to explore new ideas, create new tools, and solve problems related to history and place.

If you’re into old maps, old stuff, new ways of defining place, new stuff in old places, new interpretations of old data, old interpretations of new data, time travel, using technology for historical preservation, augmented reality, real augmentation, or anything close to it, this for you. Student, hacker, history-nerd, old building lover, preservationist, cartographer, professional, amateur–and everyone in between–all are welcome to participate.

We’ll be going from 9am to 4pm Saturday April 16 and then going some more after that at a nearby bar. The cost is $25 ($10 for students) and includes lunch.

Registration is first come, first served and will be filling up fast.

Thanks to our Hosting Sponsors: