Map Overlays
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Base Maps
Welcome to the Cambridge Historical Commission Digital Architectural Survey and History archive.
This site represents the first stage of refinement for organizing the digitized documents from first three drawers the commission's sixteen file cabinets (64 drawers of documentation on Cambridge's Buildings and their history. The three drawers seleced fo rthis pilot cover a about half the addresses in East Cambridge. The three drawers scanned fo rthis pilot represent approximately 880 distinct places and approximately 4000 documents comprised of about 7400 individual scanned pages.
This collection uses two types of items to provide staff a means of discovering and attaching knowledge concerning places and documents:
Place Items represent different sorts of places, including: (Un-linked types below had no automatically detected instances in our three-drawer pilot. )
By automated overlays of CDASH Places with geographic layers representing registerd historic properties, users can selectively browse Historically Designated Places and the documents related to them.
Document Items represent different sorts of documents found in the building files archive:
Every document is related to a place item. This makes it easy to discover all of the documents related to a particular place. Place items provide the containers where information about the place can be consolidated. Allieviating the need to store redundant informaion about places in the descriptive information about documents.
Map Browse: A big part of this project involved the wrangling of several geographic data-sets to correlate the addresses associated with CDASH documents with geographic coordinates. These coordinates in turn allow us to associate the places and items with several other data-sets reflecting property assessment, and several sorts of historical designations. And we can also browse Place and Document items on a map. This feature has a few issues at the moment which are discussed in out punch list.
Map Punch-List