State College Land Use
Overview
The State College community and Penn State’s University Park campus have changed substantially since their founding in the 1850s. The Donald W. Hamer Center for Maps and Geospatial Information owns a collection of historical Sanborn Fire Insurance maps that provide snapshots of this history in 1906, 1911, 1922, and 1929. These maps were used to provide risk assessments for insurance companies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, these early Sanborn Fire Insurance maps are used in genealogy, historical research, and many other applications. This project took the initial steps of georeferencing and mosaicing the scanned maps. Information about the 4,000 buildings was extracted by hand using ArcGIS Desktop. Historical photographs from Penn State’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library were linked to individual buildings for each time period where available to give context to the map and to also make these resources geographically discoverable. Advertisements for local businesses were harvested from historical publications and linked to the buildings that businesses once occupied. This approach was applied to additional areas as well.
Results
- Interactive ArcGIS Online maps showing georeferenced maps and building change through time
- Interactive ArcGIS Online maps showing land use change through time
- Sanborn Maps bibliography and reference list
Related applications applying approach to Gettysburg, PA and Pottsville, PA
- Gettysburg 1886 - Kiersten Hudson (Bednar Intern – Class of 2016
- Pottsville 1903 - Alia Horvath (Bednar Intern – Class of 2016)
People
Alia Horvath, Kiersten Hudson, Connor Henderson, Jack Swab, Tara Anthony, Heather Ross, Nathan Piekielek, Albert Rozo
Presentations
Ross, Horvath et al. (2016). Pennsylvania GIS Conference.
Acknowledgements
Support for this project has been provided by the Penn State University Libraries Bednar Internship Program.
State College Historical Census and Student Directories
Overview
In this project, we demonstrate the fusion of two highly detailed historical datasets to produce spatially-explicit demographic maps of the community of State College, PA for two time-periods (1920 and 1930). Historical spatial data came from building footprints digitized off of Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, while the demographic information came from manuscript U.S. Census records accessible through Ancestry.com (library-edition), and digitized Penn State student directories from the Eberly Special Collections Library in the Penn State University Libraries. Historical data is often messy and we used ABBY FineReader OCR, and regular expressions as implemented in the grep library of R to prepare the data.
Results
Following data preparation, 72% of 3,144 historical 1920 demographic records were matched to a specific building location whereas 88% of 1930 records were matched. The results are spatially-explicit datasets of demographic information that can be used to visualize the spatial dimensions of population and socio-cultural change through time.
- 1920 State College Sanborn Fire Insurance and Census Map
- 1920 State College Census and Directory Map
- 1919-2020 Penn State Student Directories with Sanborn Fire Insurance Building Information Map
- 1930 State College Sanborn Fire Insurance and Census Map
- 1930 State College Census and Directory Map
- 1929-1930 Penn State Student Directories with Sanborn Fire Insurance Building Information Map
People
Alia Horvath, Kiersten Hudson, Connor Henderson, Jack Swab, Tara Anthony, Heather Ross, Nathan Piekielek, Albert Rozo
Presentations
Acknowledgements
Support for this project has been provided by the Penn State University Libraries Bednar Internship Program.