iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Adam Cox

OldInsuranceMaps @oldinsurancemaps.net · 25/08/2026

Big news! OldInsuranceMaps.net is now a @osmus.bsky.social Charter Project! This means we are affiliated with their non-profit status, and @rileydchampine.com will be joining me (@mradamcox.bsky.social) on the Advisory Committee. It's a big step! More here: openstreetmap.us/news/2026/08...

openstreetmap.us

OldInsuranceMaps.net is now a Charter Project!

OSM US is incredibly excited to announce the latest Charter Project: OldInsuranceMaps.net (OIM)!If you’re a map nerd you’ll remember ever seeing a Sanborn Insurance Map in person. They often come in a...

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Reposted by Adam Cox

Darren Wiens @darrenwiens.github.io · 16/08/2026

Anyway, I made a font with all the quadkeys as ligatures. So, here, I type "03032" to incrementally get to the quadkey showing Nova Scotia, and you could do the same for any location on Earth. First, it shows glyph "0", then the "03" ligature, and so on until the "03032" ligature. Pretty neat, huh?

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Just published a new blog post about adding the Helmert transformation as an option during georeferencing. Hoping this can spur some "best practices" discussions as well!

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TK_Wharton @tkw.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

One of the top historical maps of New Orleans, Ogden, 1829 Map of City of New Orleans respectively dedicated to General Andrew Jackson and his brave companions in arms 8th of Jany 1815. I'll try to break down more about this great map in coming days; It says so much about a pivotal moment

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OldInsuranceMaps @oldinsurancemaps.net · 31/05/2026

Recap: May Georeference-a-thons in New Orleans: blog.oldinsurancemaps.net/2026/05/1…

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OldInsuranceMaps @oldinsurancemaps.net · 30/04/2026

Georeference-a-thons! HistoryForge (New Orleans), UMD, and UIUC: blog.oldinsurancemaps.net/2026/04/3…

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OldInsuranceMaps @oldinsurancemaps.net · 23/04/2026

Really looking forward to seeing all these small cities/towns laid out together in Yesterdays of the Inland Empire!

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OldInsuranceMaps @oldinsurancemaps.net · 03/04/2026

Last month I presented at #Code4Lib: www.youtube.com/live/6nBJ… While preparing the slides, 10 minutes was feeling really short (especially for a new audience) but I reworked some things and I think it’s actually the best introductory talk about the project I’ve given!

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OldInsuranceMaps @oldinsurancemaps.net · 02/03/2026

Presenting tomorrow at Code4Lib! Details in Newsletter: Winter (pt 2): blog.oldinsurancemaps.net/2026/03/0…

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

This is so incredibly fun to explore

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Mike O'Brien @obrien.page · 17/02/2026

🐟🦈 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...

theactnetwork.com

Student Conference Award – The Atlantic Cooperative Telemetry Network

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Katie McDonough @kmcdono.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

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

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Jerry Shannon @jerry-shannon.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

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...

communitymappinglab.org

The Absented Presence of Brooklyn Cemetery

Jerry Shannon This spring, I'm teaching my Community GIS course again. This is a studio/fieldwork based class that pairs literature on community geography and critical GIS with some kind of community....

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

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.....

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EvolvingWild @evolvingwild.evolving-hockey.com · 30/11/2025

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.

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

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

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

Debugging help is indispensable!

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

Unsurprisingly it was a CORS error... everything is _always_ a CORS error. It works now!

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

(account switching) hm, good findings, I was just getting this up and running in R. I'll compare the details of these responses and should be able to alter the OIM response to work better. Some of those response headers don't need to be included in tilejson so I should clean that up anyway.

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OldInsuranceMaps @oldinsurancemaps.net · 06/10/2025

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

A georeferenced Sanborn map sheet that shows significant distortion (Worcester, Mass., 1950, Vol. 3, p 343 (partial). The map has a few blocks but is distorted near the area of a curved road on the east side of the page.

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

My eyes just glaze over and I hit enter until all of those purple screens are gone

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

We were lucky to get you at the beginning of this bowling Renaissance!

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Perfect! Yes the Springfield georeferencing was done by a user who got in touch out of the blue and got to work on those maps, still not sure who that was!

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Great! Please don't hesitate to reach out if you need something or find issues with the site. Would love to learn more about this book sometime!

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

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.

Flyer for two community georeferencing events: Sept 16th & 23rd, at Second Line Brewing in New Orleans, LA.

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

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.

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2025

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 github.com/stac-utils/stac-fastapi can use a parquet storage as its backend, which seems like it could get […]

mapstodon.space

Original post on mapstodon.space

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

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

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RJ Andrews @infowetrust.com · 09/07/2025

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

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

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...

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pork, cheese, broccoli rabe @garlicbuffalo.gobirds.biz · 21/06/2025

amtrak’s marketing team gets it

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Reposted by Adam Cox

Healthy Regions + Policies Lab @healthyregions.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

📣 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

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Glad to hear it and thanks for trying it out! "therapeutic" needs to go on the testimonials page if I ever make one

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

In the meantime checkout this walkthrough that gives an overview of the process: about.oldinsurancemaps.net/walkthroughs..., and you can find other docs/info from there as well. Some of the docs are a bit out of date, but still close enough to get started. Don't hesitate to DM me with questions!

about.oldinsurancemaps.net

New Iberia, La., 1885 (multi-page Sanborn map) - About OldInsuranceMaps.net

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

You bet. I've added the 1887 vol. 1 map here: oldinsurancemaps.net/map/sanborn0.... You can make an account then go to that page and click "Load documents". Just let it run for a bit (I'll check on it too later)

oldinsurancemaps.net

San Francisco, Calif. | 1887 | Vol. 1 | OldInsuranceMaps.net

A crowdsourcing site for creating and viewing georeferenced mosaics of historical Sanborn fire insurance maps

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

@ktflghm.bsky.social I'd be happy to add any of these volumes to @oldinsurancemaps.net if you would like to georeference them there! The workflow is straight-forward and you can download any geotiffs or use XYZ/WMS tile layers in whatever software you want. www.loc.gov/collections/...

loc.gov

Sanborn Maps | The Library of Congress

Search results 1 - 25 of 45.

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

On @oldinsurancemaps.net oldinsurancemaps.net/san-francisc... you can find hundreds of georeferenced sheets from 1950, done by the team at the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship lab.

oldinsurancemaps.net

San Francisco, Calif.

A crowdsourcing site for creating and viewing georeferenced mosaics of historical Sanborn fire insurance maps

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

Yeah it's a strange thing about the SF Sanborns, all the streets are drawn very wide. For the team working on these, I added a parcel boundary layer (used #pmtiles @protomaps.com !) so they could split each street and georeference each block individually, snapping to parcel lines.

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Seems to me that our current dependence on GPS is fed by an expectation that we always go the quickest route and know exactly where we are at any moment. If that expectation were muted we would be happier to miss a turn sometimes and ask for directions when needed.

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Adam Cox @mradamcox.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

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....

businesswire.com

ERIS Information Inc. Sees Resolution to Longstanding Lawsuit

EDR and ERIS have announced the resolution of their dispute and lawsuit involving EDR’s claims of copyright infringement and ERIS’s claims of antitrust viola...

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Kiri Carini @kiricarini.com · 02/06/2025

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?

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Neil deGrasse Tyson @neildegrassetyson.com · 19/05/2025

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.

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