"Georectification," historical urban photography, and archiving Foursquare check-ins: Inside the New York City's "urban memory infrastructure" bank

2019-08-06T09:06:00-04:00

In 2011, the New York Public Library established an official unit for digital experimentation—NYPL Labs. Over the six years that followed, what began as a small research and development outfit for special digital projects grew into a visionary think-and-do tank for making the library’s two centuries of collections digital and usable for the years to come. A hybrid team of technologists, librarians, and designers would start to assemble the building blocks of an urban memory infrastructure.

Shannon Mattern, associate professor of media studies at The New School, and Ben Vershbow, founder of NYPL Labs, discuss the recent digitalization efforts undertaken by the New York Public Library system as it works to turn the library's "vast collections into usable data, connecting maps, photographs, menus and community memories, NYPL Labs created a series of multilayered projects that point the way to a new information ecosystem."

In this fascinating and thought-provoking conversation, Mattern and Vershbow touch on the library's efforts to stitch together insurance maps to create scrollable, Google Maps-like resources, the NYPL's store of digitized and translated restaurant menus, and the New York City tree census, among many topics.

Describing the fundamental role libraries play in preserving cultural and spatial memories, Vershbow says, "Libraries fill a need for historic preservation, a memory function. And I think that a community without access to its history is sort of li...

An App to Crowd-Source Urban Disruptions

2014-06-11T17:06:00-04:00

Maa2too3a, or ‘Happin’ in English, is a free app that uses news and crowd-sourced information to geo-tag disruptive events in the city as they occur, allowing users to mitigate risks or simply save time by avoiding them. Launched in May 2013, the app now has over 100,000 users, according to the developer, Mohammed Taha. “It’s a tool to keep people safe,” he says. And on calmer days, it can be used to simply avoid traffic jams or other routine problems.

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"Georectification," historical urban photography, and archiving Foursquare check-ins: Inside the New York City's "urban memory infrastructure" bank

An App to Crowd-Source Urban Disruptions