LATEST PAPER
73° Good Afternoon
73° Good Afternoon
News

Library asks public to help train computers to read old city maps

NYPL's Building Inspector tool asks the public to

NYPL's Building Inspector tool asks the public to get involved in identifying features of digitized maps from their collection. Photo Credit: NYPL/screengrab

Amateur cartographers, unite! The New York Public Library is asking the public to help it train its computers to read old maps of the city.

The maps are from the late 1800s and have been digitized, but to make them searchable a team of software developers at the library have created an online tool to identify buildings and locations.

Anyone from the public can help by visiting the Building Inspector website and entering addresses, classifying buildings by their colors and checking building footprints or fixing them.  

NYPL Labs' Ben Vershbow said the tool "invites the public to actively participate in the reinvention of the Library." 

"We believe public libraries can be built in collaboration with the public, not unlike Wikipedia or open source software," he added.

The goal of the crowdsourcing effort is to “harvest all the fantastic detail from the original maps” to allow researchers in the not-to-distant future to ask questions of them.

Comments

We're revamping our Comments section. Learn more and share your input.

News photos & videos
https://www.amny.com/news/library-asks-public-to-help-train-computers-to-read-old-city-maps-1.7801711
www.amny.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-30
74171
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:PJTPFXZLGSWA57PUA5RFYPO4ICPLOI5J
<urn:uuid:79bef84e-6478-4d8d-bad1-07f2b2b62baa>
2019-07-23T17:49:56Z
45.60.62.112
text/html
sha1:T5JPLCVRLHMA7H5ZBMYVJKKL3476UMKC
<urn:uuid:28715112-463d-4d1b-ad6a-f12e36cd09e4>
https://www.amny.com/news/library-asks-public-to-help-train-computers-to-read-old-city-maps-1.7801711
response
<urn:uuid:31543b79-027e-4526-bf66-20cdc14d743f>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-30
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-7-195-95.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/