MeghanIsMe

I biked out to the harbor this morning to meet up with Kate and a Kenosha News photographer. He got some photos of us standing over the drain mouth, then the three of us moved to Washington Bowl for photos with the creek where it's still open to the air. We got to talk about our interests and motivations for our work and show him some of the interesting places we've explored. He recorded some video of us talking, too, which I feel like I was a little less than eloquent in. I may actively work on public speaking at some point since I enjoy it and want to do more of it.

Anyway, it sounds like the article will be in the paper possibly as early as Sunday, though the photographer wasn't sure. I'll share a link here if it's accessible!

Erik​ and I had a pretty successful trip up Pike Creek west of the golf course today! We didn't make it all the way through the first drain, and thus did not see the other portions I was hoping to explore. Erik's boots were not as waterproof as my knee waders and we decided it would be better to get his increasingly wet feet somewhere warm and dry.

Other than that though, this was a really easy drain to get into, and it had some interesting twists, turns, and junctions. I'm planning to come back at some point and see more of it, as well as the other portions, so let me know if you want to come with!





More photos ( behind the cut. )

That was fun! I need to do that again soon!

I've found a new thing that I see a high potential to get obsessive over. It has just the right combination of creativity and rationality; art and science. It's similar to the way I feel when I'm editing photos; the process is really satisfying, and I think I need to be on guard against spending too much time doing this and neglecting my other work. Here's a screenshot of what I'm working on, before I drag myself away and get ready for bed.





Each numbered plus sign is a point of correlation between the 1972 map and a current street map of the city. I've invested about two hours into this map and have nearly two hundred control points. It feels rather like performing cartographic surgery. It's also a lot like smoothing bubbles out from under a sticker. I have to keep plotting points that resolve distortion introduced by the last point. Once there are enough, though, it all lines up in a really beautiful way.

As I work on this, it's been really interesting to think about the choices made by the cartographers who worked on creating these maps. No map represents reality perfectly. There may be, for instance, an intersection that doesn't line up quite perfectly in real life. Maybe somebody messed up when platting a subdivision. Maybe the roads didn't match up when the area was annexed. Who knows? On the map, maybe the real life offset is there, but if it's small enough, maybe it isn't. If it's not, I have to decide how to compromise my referencing to minimize inaccuracies by spreading them across the area in question rather than bunching them up in one spot. Thus, I'm frequently making judgment calls, when my map isn't quite lining up with the current street map, about whether I'm looking at change over time, cartographic error, or just some necessary fudging in the map design. I make my choice and reference accordingly. That's the art part. And maybe even a little psychology, as I get into the head of the person who was putting the map together and think about why choices were made and what the implications are.

My nice, new computer lets me work on ArcGIS on the middle monitor, Google Earth (with all my other completed overlays available) on the left monitor, and the original full size image file of the map I'm working with on the right monitor, as well as all the ArcGIS tool panels. I can easily refer between all of this stuff spread out in front of me and it makes the work *so* much faster. I'm really happy with my setup.

I'm going to make some of these available as Google Earth KMZs for interested folks to download. I can't do that with the Sanborn maps, as the Wisconsin Historical Society asked that I not distribute high-res versions. But I want to have a big collection of overlays that maybe the University of Wisconsin-Parkside Archives and Area Research Center could distribute to interested researchers. I'd definitely like all the work I'm doing to be a contribution to common knowledge.

Speaking of such things, does anyone I know have any experience getting either KMZ files or georeferenced TIFs or JPGs to overlay correctly in Google Maps?

I thought I'd take a break and do some more online newspaper research on Pike Creek. Last time I was using Access Newspaper Archive to go through OCRd papers, I found hundreds of results from the 19th century. Now I've finding six. Hmm....

Ok, so the hundred plus results prior to 1861 that I went through last time are still there. There's just nearly nothing from then to 1900. How odd.... I guess searching the newspapers won't be quite so easy as I thought.

This is one of the drainage canals feeding the retention bason near Shopko.
This may or may not be part of the historic Pike Creek watershed. Historic maps don't show a direct connection. However, a 1958 topographic map shows a stream in this area that runs to near where a 1931 plat map shows a southern branch of Pike Creek that no longer exists.
History has its mysteries.






More infrastructure ( behind the cut. )