At one point, Philadelphia wasn't a city but a cluster of municipalities and townships. When Joan Decker, commissioner of Philadelphia's Department of Records, started working on
PhillyHistory.org -- a location-based search engine for over 100,000 archival photos -- locating historical addresses was a problem.
Azavea, a local company that specializes in the creation of geographic web and mobile software, helped out with the project and quickly realized that this issue -- constantly changing addresses -- is a problem not only in Philly, but in cities around the world.
To make historical records more accessible to archives, museums and libraries, Azavea is creating
GIS-enabled tools that will solve the address issue. The Temporal Geocoder project will use an open-source platform to collect historical addresses and develop prototype software to geographically tag them. Azavea's proof-of-concept phase -- which will be developed for Philadelphia -- recently received a $150,000 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation. As the project develops, Azavea plans to hire public history specialists to help with the archives.
“We've become accustom to the idea that you can type an address into Google Maps, or some other map based application, and find the location," says Robert Cheetham, founder and president of Azavea. "That's not the case for anything going back more than a few decades. Addresses and intersections have all been changing over the course of the city's history."
Cheetham says the Temporal Geocoder could assist with matters related to property, epidemiology and family history. In the grander scheme, the project represents a new frontier for digital searches.
"This is a real opportunity to explore what some people call 'old knowledge,'" he says. "We've grown accustomed to Googling something and accepting that that's the sum of human knowledge. In many cases, it's really just a tiny snapshot. There’s an enormously rich trove of experiences and knowledge in the archives all over the world."
Source: Robert Cheetham, Azavea
Writer: Dana Henry