MeghanIsMe

Hey restoman; I just copied the entire 1892 JW Vose fire insurance atlas from the SU library today! I have the whole thing, and you're welcome a copy if you have 8GB of space to store it somewhere. Bird Library has maps from several other years scanned from Hopkins atlases too, all on DVD. I'm going to get all of them, as time allows.

Here's one sheet cropped down to our little neck of the woods. The canal was so close! I can almost imagine it! And those mansions you told me about lining James Street; those were really something, weren't they? I can tell, even with these simple plan views. The paths sprawling over the grounds, the carriagehouses in the back, the one with a greenhouse on the property....





I need to email you. I see a Chinese buffet trip in our future, if you're free on Sunday for dinner.

A stalled construction project left a big hole in the ground in the middle of Nashville. It has now been there long enough, full of rainwater, that it appears as a water body on Google Maps.

That's fascinating to me, especially after comparing so many plat maps of southeastern Wisconsin across a century. Water bodies change a lot, due to both natural causes and human intervention. As the scale on which our construction operates becomes larger, and the time scales of change grow shorter, and the line between natural and artificial feature blurs, how long should a feature be around before it gets added to maps? Or is it a matter of how long it's expected to be around? Does the current digital paradigm of mapmaking, allowing swift and easy editing of features, affect what we choose to include or exclude from maps? How does this apply to maps featuring socially constructed place-definitions?

http://www.citylab.com/weather/2015/05/stalled-development-created-an-accidental-lake-in-nashville/393941/?utm_source=SFFB