- Welcome, everyone, to
Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen,
I work here at
the UW-Madison
Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW-Extension
Cooperative Extension, and on
behalf of those folks and
our other co-organizers,
Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW-Madison
Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to
Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday
night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my pleasure
to introduce to you
AJ Wortley and Jaime Martindale.
AJ was born in New Bern, North
Carolina, went to high school in
Rensselaer, Indiana, came here
to UW-Madison to get a degree in
civil engineering, and since
1998 has been with the State
Cartographer's Office in the
world famous Science Hall,
which is a National
Historic Landmark.
And it's the only National
Historic Landmark
that has a period after hall.
[laughter]
And we don't know why.
And his colleague,
Jaime Martindale.
She was born in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
graduated from South
Milwaukee High School,
went to UW-Milwaukee and
got an undergraduate degree
in conservation biology,
then got her master's degree
at UW-Milwaukee in library
and information sciences.
She then spent two years
at Cornell University
at the Mann Library.
And she's been here since 2003.
Both of them are in the
Department of Geography, and
they get to talk to us tonight
about one of the more amazing
projects that I didn't know
much about until recently,
and that is this four-year
project to photograph
all of Wisconsin
from 1937 to 1941.
So tonight we get to hear
about historic aerial
photos in Wisconsin.
Please join me in
welcoming Jamie Martindale
to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
[applause]

- Thank you, everybody.
I am really excited to be here.
I've been a fan of the Wednesday
Nite @ the Lab lecture series.
This is my first chance to
actually give a talk during the
lecture series, so I'm really
excited and thrilled to be here.
Thank you for joining us for
this presentation tonight.
And I'm also really excited
to be presenting on
one of my absolute
favorite subjects,
which is historic
aerial photography.
I manage a huge collection
of aerial photos in the
Map Library, which I
will introduce you to
and show to you,
and I'm hopeful that after
this hour-long presentation
you'll have the same sort of
love for these images as I do.
So we'll get started.
First we want to introduce
ourselves to you, talk a little
bit about the geography
department and Science Hall.
As Tom mentioned, it is an
absolutely wonderful building.
I think everybody that works in
Science Hall feels really lucky
to be able to go to work in such
a beautiful place every day.
And we'll do an introduction to
and overview of the aerial
photograph collection
in the Map Library.
And then, you know, as I was
learning about what it means to
curate and manage collections
of historic photos like this,
I didn't know a ton about it
when I first started here at UW.
I sort of inherited this
collection, and I thought, okay,
what is the origin of this?
Why are these photos here?
Why were they taken
in the first place?
And so I want to share some of
that history with you because I
think that story of going back
to the 1930s and the New Deal
and FDR's New Deal and why these
images were important then
and why they're still
important today.
And then, of course, we have
to look at some examples.
So I want to show you
some views from above.
And we'll do some comparisons of
what places looked like in
Wisconsin in the 1930s compared
to what they look like today.
And we can sort of
look at that change.
And then I'm going to transition
the presentation over to AJ, and
he's going to talk with you
about a project to digitize the
oldest series of aerial images
in Wisconsin, which took place
from 1937 to 1941, and make
those available online so that
you can leave the lecture and go
home and start looking at 1930s
photos on your computer at home.

Before I move on to the next
slide, I have a series of sample
aerial images sort of peppered
throughout the presentation.
And I'm wondering if
anybody can guess
what this image
is showing us?
So this image is taken somewhere
in Wisconsin in October of 1937.
- Platteville.
- Right.
This is the Platte Mound M.
So this is a symbol of the
College of Mining
at the University of
Wisconsin-Platteville.
And it was constructed
in 1937 by students
in the College of
Engineering there.
And their primary goal was to
create an M that was larger than
the M that existed at
their rival institution
the Colorado School of Mines.
[laughter]
So they already had an M,
but Platteville wanted
to make a bigger M.
So it's literally the
world's largest M.
And on October 16th of 1937,
they lit it on fire to celebrate
homecoming, which is still a
tradition that they do every
year at homecoming and probably
for other festivities.
So this is just one really great
example of how you can view
historic and cultural
features in Wisconsin
using aerial photography.

So, as I mentioned, AJ
and I come to you today
from historic Science Hall.
The current Science Hall
building that we occupy
is actually the second
Science Hall on campus.
The very first Science Hall
building was built in 1875.
It was the second instructional
building on the UW campus.
It burned to the ground in 1884.
So they built this
second building.
It was completed in 1888.
And at one time it housed all of
the sciences and engineering
departments and colleges
at the university.
Now it basically is home to
the Department of Geography
and the Nelson Institute
for Environmental Studies.

And inside Science Hall, I work
in the Robinson Map Library,
which is up on the third floor.
We actually occupy
the entire north wing
of the third floor
of the building.
The library was named for
Professor Arthur H Robinson.
He taught cartography in
the geography department
from 1945 until 1980.
He was also not only responsible
for starting the Map Library in
Science Hall but he also started
the UW Cartography Lab, which is
still a production map facility
also located in Science Hall,
and the Wisconsin State
Cartographer's Office,
which is also in Science Hall and part of geography.
So, needless to say, there are a
lot of us in Science Hall
who sort of owe our careers
to Professor Robinson
and his legacy in the
Department of Geography.
The collection is
pretty impressive.
It's over a half a
million items in total.
So about 287,000 maps, and the
aerial photograph collection
is the largest of its kind
in the state of Wisconsin.
So it's around 260,000
individual contact prints
in the collection.
The earliest aerial photos
were flown in 1937.
We'll focus on that collection
in this presentation today.
And the latest photos we have
for most places in Wisconsin
are around 2000 to 2005.
There are a couple of counties
where we've got later images,
but really starting in
about 2004 federal imagery
was basically all
digital at that point.
And so now, in 2017, we're
really sort of at the end
of that sort of print
aerial photograph era,
for the most part.

So, you might be wondering how
people use this photography.
And the photograph collection
in the library is really one
that's used by a really
diverse group of users.
So it's not that we can say that
it's primarily academic use or,
you know, it's really just
general public interest.
It's really across the board.
We have a lot of students and
faculty and staff that use it
obviously for academic
and research projects.
But we also have a huge
contingency of users
that come from the
private sector.
So we get a lot of work or
people from engineering
communities, from environmental
science communities.
We get a lot of lawyers.
So there's a lot of legal cases
that can be dealt with
with aerial photos.
And so these are just six
examples that we see a lot,
that we see users come to
the library most often for.
And the first one is land use
or land form change studies.
So obviously looking back at a
place in time, and for most
places in Wisconsin within our
collection, you can get a
snapshot every decade from
the '30s through about 2000.
So you can get that,
every 10 years you can
see that progression
of how places have changed
or not changed,
depending on what
you're looking for.
Environmental restoration
projects, so using historical
photos to sort of see what the
land cover in a particular place
was like 80 years ago with the
hopes of potentially returning
it back to that, you know, more
pristine state than it is today.
That's another
really good example.
And site selections, this is
really common for engineering
consultants, environmental
consultants.
So any time a piece of land
is set to be developed
commercially, they have to do a
thorough environmental history
of that parcel of land before
they can do any development.
It's actually called an EPA
phase one assessment.
And that, those site selections
are done so that the developer
knows the full history and what
may or may not have to happen to
that piece of land before
development can occur.
So, for example, if you pull a
1950 aerial photo and there's a
gas station in the middle of the
property, there potentially
could be fuel tanks underground
that may have to be dealt with
before commercial
development can happen.
And then I mentioned
legal cases.
There are a lot of property
owners in Wisconsin that find
themselves in the midst
of property disputes.
Rural land owners who own large
tracts of land is really common
to have issues with their
neighbors trying to take
20 acres and adverse
possession issues.
And so a lot of times
aerial photos can be used
to either prove or disprove, essentially,
the existence of features
at a given time.
So if the property deed says the
western boundary was this fence
line, which a lot of really old
property deeds sometimes do,
and that fence line is no longer
there, maybe the only way to
prove it is to show
it on a photograph.
And so we do a lot of work with
lawyers and their clients
to find aerial photos
that help them with that.
And then, of course, genealogy
and just personal interests.
So, it's really cool to be able
to look at the place where
you're from, for example,
80 years ago on a photograph.
So we get a lot of people that
are just really interested in,
you know, their family history
and their grandparents' farm or
their great-grandparents' farm
and what it looked like 80 years
ago when maybe they lived there.
And it's amazing when you see
these images of these places
back then and the
stories that come up.
And there's this sense of
place that people have.
So it kind of just reminds
us of how things used to be.
It's kind of comforting in a way
to be able to walk back in time.
This is an example of the
Milwaukee lake front in 1937.
And I don't know how, if you're
familiar at all with this area,
but if I show you the 2015
version of this same area,
you'll notice it's the
Summerfest grounds. Right?
You can see the
Summerfest grounds.
You can see 794 here.
You can see this is the
Hoan Bridge right here.
But, essentially, this entire
chunk of land that Summerfest
and the Summerfest Island where
the fireworks get shot off,
usually for different festivals,
was basically filled in and created in Lake Michigan.
So, I can go back
and just show you.
You can kind of see where it's
literally the lake, and then it
becomes a chunk of land
that people go and visit
by the tens of thousands every
summer for different things.
So, kind of cool to see that.
You can actually see the
Summerfest smiley face too in
the middle of the amphitheater
there, which is kind of neat.

Okay, so I mentioned to you
that I'm sort of fascinated
by the history of these photos,
and I hope you are too.
So, indulge me in being able
to tell you this story
because I think the historic
nature of why these photos exist
is kind of an interesting thing.
And Wisconsin kind of plays an
interesting role in that story.
So we have to go all
the way back to 1862.
President Lincoln signs the law
that creates the US Department
of Agriculture, and he calls
it the people's department.
And, in the 1860s, 48% of
Americans were farmers
who needed good seeds and
information to grow their crops.
So it was really an important
thing at that time.
Fast forward to the 1930s,
the Great Depression
hits farmers extremely hard.
Falling prices for produce and
livestock encouraged increased
production which of course
further led to lower prices.
Between 1929 and 1932,
the net average income
of the farm operator fell 69%, according to the US Census.
So, obviously at this time,
without higher and stable
prices, the farmers that
were able to remain farming
faced a pretty bleak future.

Elected in late 1932, President
Roosevelt made the Agricultural
Adjustment Act one of the
first legislative proposals
under the New Deal.
Two months after Roosevelt took
office in May of 1933, Congress
established the Agricultural
Adjustment Administration,
and that would
oversee that program.
Secretary of Agriculture Henry
Wallace, if you know what he
looks like-- he's right here--
his vision of the ever-normal
granary was propelled
into action
via the creation of this AAA.
The goal of the AAA, of course,
was to strike and maintain
a balance between production
and consumption of
agricultural commodities.
But because the government
couldn't order farmers to plant
less, New Deal planners devised
a voluntary acreage reduction
program that had attractive
incentives, local control,
and surveillance
procedures which included
aerial photography
that would verify compliance
with the program.
Over the next two-and-a-half
years, the agency focused on
controlling production through
these voluntary contracts with
growers who agreed to reduce
acreage in exchange for benefit
payments that they would receive
to offset the lost income.
The payments were
funded through a tax
that was placed on the
commodity processors.
However, in 1936,
the Supreme Court ruled
that that tax was unconstitutional.
So Congress quickly reacted,
adopting a new conservation
program instead, which utilized
grants to pay farmers to switch
from soil depleting to
soil conserving crops.
The Farm Act of 1938 included
key changes and combined
conservation with production
and marketing controls.
Grants funded by the federal
government for soil conserving
and soil building practices
replaced the acreage reduction
contracts, and farmers simply
applied for whatever grants
and payments they
were eligible for.
Wisconsin was a leader in soil
conservation in the early 1930s
and home to the very first soil
erosion study by another newly
created New Deal agency called
the Soil Erosion Service.
The Coon Creek Watershed soil
erosion control demonstration
in western Vernon County was
the first in the nation.
Hugely successful.
It sparked additional erosion
control demonstrations
and practices across
rural America.

Strip cropping was one common
soil conservation practice.
The conservation technicians who
laid out strips became artists.
They read the land and
envisioned how contours flowed
around the slope and into
a landscape painting.
At one time, 80% of the cropland
in southwest Wisconsin
was in contour strip cropping.
Wisconsin's first comprehensive
USDA aerial flight took place
in 1937 and lasted through 1941.
This photography was initially
utilized to monitor compliance
with those soil
conservation programs.

Whether focused on conservation
or production controls, New Deal
farm policy, and the 1938 Farm
Act in particular, depended on
accurate measurements of field
size at the farm level.
In the 1860s, precise
field measurements
were made by carrying
chains around the field,
and then the maps
were drawn by hand.
But a more accurate,
inexpensive, and efficient
method was absolutely needed to
be able to measure millions
of acres of farmland
across the United States.
In 1937, studies began on the
effectiveness and accuracy
of utilizing aerial
photos as a proxy
for measuring the
actual field sizes.
In the early 1940s,
USDA established
two aerial photo
photography labs.
One was in Asheville,
North Carolina,
and the other was in
Salt Lake City, Utah.
Field acreages were measured
with a planimeter, a mechanical
device used for measuring areas
in the plain that allowed
technicians to take measurements
directly on the aerial
photographs themselves.

So just in summary, aerial
photos were a huge part of
New Deal farm policy, both for
monitoring compliance, for
grant-funded programs, as well
as a tool for actually measuring
and assessing the agricultural
lands across the US.
They also laid the foundation
for the very first soil surveys
created for the United States.
They're still used in
this capacity today.
So the USDA Farm Service Agency
still flies aerial photos every
year and uses it to help manage
and work with farmers to help
maintain and best manage
their agricultural lands.
So this is a really great photo.
This is a 1968 image in
Lafayette County, but just
gives you an example of what
strip cropping looks like.
It really looks like
a piece of art to me.
It's just beautiful.
Okay, so now you know the
history and you know the utility
of these amazing primary
research resources,
so let's take a look at
some views from above.
And when I do these
presentations, I talk about
aerial photos a lot and I travel
around and talk with people
about aerial photos and I always
try to come up with examples
that are meaningful for
wherever I'm presenting.
So this one was great
because it's here, right?
It's right on campus.
So this is a 1937 and a 2016
image essentially of campus.
And one of the things you'll
notice that your eyes do when
you look at imagery in this
way is you instantly search
for the things
that are the same.
You instantly look for, like,
Bascom Hill for example.
Very clearly visible
on both images.
And then you can kind of orient
yourself and then slowly start
to envision where things
look totally different.
So the area on the
west side of campus
obviously looked pretty open.
It looks like fields,
essentially.
And there's a lot more going
on there today, obviously.
So if we zoom in to Henry Mall,
which is, of course,
where we are right now,
we can highlight
five different buildings
in this area.
And I had to reference my 1937
campus map that we have in the
Map Library to, basically,
accurately determine what the
buildings were at that
time from the photo.
And there were two that
sort of struck me.
One is number four,
the genetics Biotech Center, which is where we are,
was a high school,
which I didn't know.
And maybe some of you knew that,
but I thought that was
pretty fascinating.
And the other one was number
five, the Medical Sciences
Center, which was the
Wisconsin General Hospital.
And as we were walking over here
from Science Hall, we noticed
that on the front of the
building you can still see
where it says Wisconsin
General Hospital.
So I thought maybe everybody
knows that it was a hospital
because it says that.
But one of the things that
happens when I do research for
aerial photo presentations like
this is I find something that I
didn't know, and maybe it's
because I'm a librarian, I don't
know, but then I find myself
down a rabbit hole researching
everything I can about Wisconsin
High School and the history of
it and why was there a high
school on the UW campus.
It was kind of an
interesting story.
So I found all these newspaper
clippings and there's a whole
website dedicated to the history
of the school and the building.
And one of the things I
discovered was that it actually,
so it was a high
school until 1964.
The last graduating class
graduated from Wisconsin
High School in 1964.
Any students that were currently
enrolled there then split
between Central High School
or Madison West.
And there was a, there were
several newspaper articles
that sort of highlighted,
you know, the last commencement
was the 53rd and
final commencement.
It was May 28th of '64.
And they interviewed the
principal, and it kind of seemed
like at this time of transition
where, in 1964, the university
had decided that it really
needed to utilize that building
for university
academic programs.
And the student enrollment at
the high school was dropping.
So there was, I'm sure, a
combination of a lot of factors
that went into the decision to,
you know, make the transition
from the high school
to a campus building.
But the principal of the high
school had been there since
1948, and he didn't seem super
excited about the closure
of the school and the
transition that was happening.
And I highlighted some of
this newspaper article.
I have to read it
because it's great.
So, it says, "The principal,
since 1948, said last week that
"persons from several
departments of the university
"were already in the school
to measure desks
"and look at equipment to
see what they could get." [laughter]
"One group," he said,
"even made the request that we
"leave the water bubbler and
bulletin boards here as if we'd
"planned to take them with us." [laughter]
"He also told about
the concern of two alumni
"for the high school's
athletic trophies.
"The Wisconsin High School was
the state basketball champion in
"1923, and huge silver trophies
attesting to that fact
"graced the halls
of the school.
"A member of the championship
team said it would be a
"sacrilege for the trophies
to grace the halls
"of Central High School,
our bitter rival.
"Better to melt
them up for scrap
"or dump them in Lake Mendota." [laughter]
So, I thought, wow,
some pretty serious athletic
rivalries at that time.
So, in the '20s, which was
kind of interesting.
So these are the kinds of
stories that just come up when
you find things that you didn't
know about these places, and I
really think it's a testament to
just geography in general
and that sense of place and
learning about our history.
So, my second example, of course
you know I'm from Milwaukee.
I basically grew up
in County Stadium.
My parents were
huge baseball fans.
And when I discovered that the
site where County Stadium would
be built in 1953 was peppered by
these tiny little baseball
fields, I thought it simply
could not be a coincidence that
baseball just was meant to exist
in that location in our state.
So, of course, County Stadium,
built in 1953.
This is a 1963 image of it.
So, pretty drastic differences.
Obviously the whole
entire highway system
was built in between that time.
The Brewers played at County
Stadium, of course, until 2000
when Miller Park opened in 2001.
And you can see the differences
in those two images as well.
The imagery from 2015 is from
the Milwaukee County Land Information Office.
And this imagery has
such high resolution
that there is a small sort of
like Little League field
kind of in the middle
of the parking lot.
Helfaer Field it's called here.
There's a monument where the old
County Stadium home plate was.
There's like a metal monument
in the ground marking
where the actual home plate
from County Stadium was.
And you can actually zoom in
close enough to see that little
thing in the pavement,
which is kind of amazing.
You can't do that
with the old photos.
You just, you don't have
the same resolution.
But it's pretty amazing to
see that difference.
And then, last summer, we had a
pretty interesting reference
question from a person who was
looking for evidence of an
Air Force B-52 bomber crash
in Sawyer County, Wisconsin.
And it happened
November 18th of 1966.
He sent me a sort of really
crude Google map with a giant
red circle that said,
"It happened somewhere in here."
And I was like, oh, my gosh,
there's hundreds of photos.
But we used maps and we--
I did the whole research.
I found a bunch of newspaper
articles that sort of described
in more detail where
the crash happened.
It was a very big deal.
It was just outside of
Stone Lake, which is
kind of a rural area, obviously.
And we ended up finding a
USDA aerial photo from 1970,
so four years later, that
still clearly showed the scar
in the forest where
the plane crashed.
And the reason that he
wanted to find this
was actually pretty amazing.
He used to summer
there was a kid.
He's from Illinois, but his
parents had a cabin up there,
his family had a cabin up there.
And it was always something they
talked about and was really
meaningful for him to be able to
travel there to put a marker
at the site of the crash
to honor the nine airmen
that died that night.
And so we found the location,
helped him with aerial photos
find the location, and then
last fall, so November of 2016,
was the 50th anniversary
of the crash.
And so he traveled there
and put the marker there
in honor of those men.
So that was a pretty great
reference question and a pretty
great result from that,
being able to find it.
And then this is
my last example.
We talk a lot about how we want to see change illustrated.
We want to see how things have
progressed or, you know,
how different places look
from one time to another.
But sometimes it's really
comforting when you find things
that have not changed at all.
And this is a really great
example of 70 years
of cranberry marshes
in Wood County.
Wood County, of course,
number one cranberry-producing county in Wisconsin.
4,000 acres of cranberry
marsh in that county.
And there is basically
no difference
between these two images.
And this, to me, the geometric
landscape of what these look
like from above is
really beautiful.
So I'm kind of grateful that

nothing has changed in that area
because it's pretty beautiful.
So I'm going to transition over
to AJ to talk about the digital
versions of some of these
photos, but my hope is that you
sort of understand why I think
these photos are so amazing.
And one of the reasons that we
wanted to increase access
to the collection is because
they're so personal to people.
And you can, you know, do your
own research and what's
important to you and places are
important to you, but you can't
really do that, easily, if you
have to come to the library
and pull photos out
of file cabinets.
And so we were really interested
in finding a way to broaden
access and get at least the
oldest photos in the collection
out more broadly so that people
can do this kind of research
and look at these photos
basically from their home.
And AJ is going to talk
about making that transition
from the print to the digital.
So, thank you.
[applause]

- Thanks, Jaime.

So, hello, everyone.
I am AJ, and, as Tom mentioned,
I work at the State Cartographer's Office.
Most people haven't heard of the
State Cartographer's Office
in Wisconsin.
But it is a pretty amazing
entity and one of only two
states that have a state
cartographer's office.
Arizona would be
the other state.
I know usually when I tell
people, for example, from my
home state of Indiana that I
work at a state cartographer's
office, I get a variety
of answers, including
"Isn't the mapping all done?"
and "Do you still
make them by hand?"
[laughter]
And, "No, it's not
all done,"
and "No, we don't make
them by hand anymore."
But, our office does do a
variety of interesting projects
these days, many of
which I don't go into.
But as part of that, we have
five permanent staff, and,
more importantly,
we have nine students
who work up in a
lab up above us.
And besides putting together
things like the third version of
Wisconsin's statewide parcel map
in digital form and doing a
variety of other kind of data
creation and integration
projects, one thing that we
occasionally get to embark on,
particularly in collaboration
with the Map Library,
is bringing historical
map resources
into the current digital world.
And the students that I
mentioned are a key component
of that in that they do all
of the technical programming
and web programming in
order to make that happen.
And I work with them to develop
those skills, and usually those
skills go to helping them find a
better job when they graduate.
So when we're thinking about
the project, and we've had an
opportunity to collaborate with
the Map Library on a variety
of projects over the years, but
when we're thinking about the
project of bringing these 1930s
and 1940s photos into the
digital age, one of the things
we always try to do is
understand how do
people naturally
already find these photos?
What is their natural
intuitive way to come at it?
And so I actually have visited
with Jaime at various times at
length to talk about the fact
that in the beginning, when she
got everything organized, really
the only way to gain access to
these photos was to either call
Jaime on the telephone and
describe the area you're looking
for or come to the Map Library,
which is a public facility, and
visit it in person, at which
time you could either scan them
yourself or you could take away
a paper order form and then mail
it in to have students scan
and send you the photos.
Later we would transition that
paper order form into an online
catalog of aerial photography
and an online order form through
the Map Library, of which we'll
take a quick peak at our online
catalog, a long time one of
our most popular applications
on our website.
And then, finally, we'll get
into the direct online download
and what the students created
over the last few years.
So, to start with, this
is our latest iteration
of our Wisconsin Aerial
Photography Catalog.
I believe this is our third
or fourth iteration
since we've been
on the Internet.
Though they did exist as paper
catalogs before that time.
It's something that our office
has been doing almost since
the beginning when
Arthur H Robinson
and others helped in the creation of the office.
The way the catalog works, as
you might imagine a card catalog
works, is you might search by
either location or date.
And then, upon searching,
you'll come up with a listing,
as you'll see down below, of
various vintages of photography
that exist by county
for a given area.
At the bottom, you'll see we
still maintain linkages to that
digital online ordering form, as
there are many more photos in
the library than we were able to
get into this one application.
And the other thing you'll
notice is that for all of the
collections that exist in the
Map Library, we also have
digital what you would call
flight index sheets.
And these flight index sheets
come in a variety of different
forms, but this one is important
in that many times the flights
were kind of manually plotted
out and then the best index
you had to go and locate a
particular photo relative
to a place on the ground was
to use a grid like this.
And you'll see the flight line
numbers running across the top
of this index, and then little
individual exposure numbers
written by each dot.
And those are actually how
Jaime and her staff reference
these photos within each
collection is a flight line
and an exposure number.
And these dots will become
important later because they
were a key way or they relate to
a key technological way that we
were able to accelerate getting
all of these photos online
for Wisconsin and a wider
audience to enjoy.
So the 1930s photos are also in
the catalog, but we no longer
maintain the indexes for those
because you can directly go
and search and freely download
all of those photos,
as is with this record
for 1937 for Dane County.
And that's a result of our
application that we call
WHAIFinder, which is short for
the Wisconsin Historic
Aerial Image Finder.
This was a-- There are
a few stats around.
There are over 38,000 photos
in the application.
It is complete statewide
coverage, though we are missing
about a hundred photos, but, as
I'll show you in a little bit,
most of the areas are still
covered because many of these
photos that have overlap that
cover adjacent areas.
They are all at a
consistent scale.
And we like to think it's an
easy to use web application.
There are a variety of formats
you can download as well.
If you're in a rural area and
have relatively low bandwidth,
we have reduced
resolution JPEGs.
Otherwise you can get the
original resolution scanned
just as we store it.
And there are no fees
for subscriptions
or anything like that to use it.
This project, to create it, was
a university-wide collaboration,
plus the Department
of Transportation.
As we were assessing the
collection in the Map Library,
we realized there were a few
areas that we didn't have
complete coverage, and it
turns out that one of the
district offices of the
Department of Transportation
had those photos that we needed.
And so we were able to combine
collections in order to create
the comprehensive
statewide collection.
We also involved University of
Wisconsin Digital Collections,
which is part of
Memorial Library.
They actually handle super
long-term preservation
and storage of digital objects,
including scanned photos.
And so they handle all of the
long-term sturdy storage
of those, and we merely link
to the copies of those.
This project was three years
long, from about 2008 to 2011,
and was completely enabled, it
would not have been possible
without the support of the Ira
and Ineva Reilly Baldwin
Wisconsin Idea Endowment, which
does internal grants on campus
for projects that have
a particular use
and impact for Wisconsin itself.
And I think we're all who were
involved proud to say that
in 2011 it did also receive
the Governor's Award
for Archival Innovation from the
Wisconsin Historical
Records Advisory Board.

So now in its second iteration,
the first one that our students
wrote actually lasted six years,
which is a lifetime
on the Internet, but we were
glad it lasted that long
because we were just able to
get this one out this summer.
This is our rewritten,
completely written and coded by
students, reconception then of
how, like I said, replicating
the way folks in the
Map Library would work.
They would usually start in the
card catalog, and they'd find
which file cabinet they needed
to go to and which index map,
and then they'd pull out a big
index map that's bigger than
this lectern and search for
their area of interest.
Hopefully they could identify
it, find that flight line
and exposure number, and then
go into the big folders
and find their
individual photos.
So we link from the card catalog
to here for just those oldest
series of photos, and then
attempt to give you, as circled
in red, a few ways that you're
able to navigate quickly,
hopefully, to your
area of interest.
Up in the left you can zoom
to a particular county,
or even enter a street address and zoom directly to that.
And down in the right, in a nod
to our students trying to make
these applications more
accessible on mobile devices,
like tablets and phones, we
have the "locate me" button,
which you'll see more and more
often in mapping applications,
to essentially zoom you
to right wherever you are
even if you don't
know where that is.
[laughter]
At this point and at
the risk of potential failure,
but not, we're going to actually
do a live demonstration.
So this is the application
directly linked from both
the Map Library and the State
Cartographer's Office website.
And we thought we'd show
you a few examples.
Jaime showed you some
examples in her slides.
And here are examples
that you yourself
could go and do as well.
So, first of all, we'll test out
that "locate me" button,
which worked a short while ago.
And we'll see that
it's not too bad.
And here we are on Henry Mall.
And if we zoomed out just a
little bit, it's not quite
perfect, what we'll start to
see are some white dots appear.
And what those white dots are,
are those same dots
that you saw in
those index maps.
And what's unique about this
collection and how we got them
online is there were other
universities about that same
time, between 2005 and 2010,
trying to get some of their
oldest historical photos online
because, amongst other things,
they were actually
becoming unstable.
This is pretty old print paper
at this point, right?
75 or 80 years.
But many of them were actually
trying to locate on the map
where each individual photo was,
and those projects were taking
years and years, sometimes a
decade for as many thousands
of photos as we did.
And so we didn't actually
geographically locate the
individual photos, but we did
have a really talented graduate
student who wrote a program for
us that used pattern recognition
to go and scan those index maps
and actually just
take off the dots.
And then we had students use
some innovative ways to locate
the dots strategically
on the landscape.
And then we loosely positioned
the photo over those dots.
That enabled us to
finish the project
in a much-accelerated fashion.
And what you'll find then is
that you can then simply go and
hover on a dot, and you can see
the photo approximately placed
where it's supposed to be,
but, in many cases, it,
in fact, is pretty right on.
This would be an example of the photo where we are, right now.
You'll see that if you click on
an area, for example the stadium
right there, clicking on an area
actually will highlight, in most
cases, multiple dots, and
that's part of the nature
of these collections of
aerial photographs is that
they're not kind of end to end in a patchwork quilt
but rather they have both end lap and overlap on the sides.
And that was in part so that the
folks who were looking at the
photos from the farm service
could actually use a manual pair
of glasses with two different
lenses and do stereo viewing of
these photos to better be
able to interpret the photos
and see the crops that
they were evaluating,
but as a result of it,
it also means
that we have more than one photo that covers any given area.
So if you have an area of
interest that you're searching
for and this particular photo
might happen to be blurry or had
some cloud cover or something,
then there's usually also
another one that you
can take a look at
that has many of the
same areas covered.
And so that gives our an
opportunity to have,
in some cases, multiple
perspectives of a place.

Beyond just hovering and looking
at a photo, you can also then
click on an individual photo
record, and much like as if you
were drilling down from the card
catalog and flight index, you're
now taken to a place where you
can directly download a small,
medium, or large size, or
go and zoom in and preview
that photo at a much
higher resolution,
which we'll show you
in just a moment.
Since we're on the subject of
football stadiums this time,
instead of baseball, I
figured we'd go ahead
and go over to Brown
County as well.
And just to prove to our
students that it works, if we
were to type in 1265 Lombardi
Avenue, you'd see that...

...we're taken to another
familiar football stadium,
the home of the
Green Bay Packers.
And I'll just bring it
in a little closer here.

And, of course, one interesting
thing about being near Lambeau
Field is that if you go back and
look at the historical photos,
you realize Green Bay didn't
even go that far yet. [laughter]
And so we might consider
the whole western portion
of Green Bay
to be Packerville for that
part because certainly
a lot of development happened
around Lambeau Field
and the existence of the Green
Bay Packers in Green Bay.
But it's a pretty impressive
view to see just in 75 or 80
years how Green Bay has
changed over this time.

And so we can zoom out
and again see that
we could go and look at that stadium on multiple photos,
or the lack of stadium
in this case.
I thought that I'd just show you
one more interesting example.
While I'm sure that many of
you have your own examples
that you could think
of and would like to
go look at and some things
are easier to identify
from these scale of aerial
photos and some are not.
But as I was asking some friends
who work in the field of mapping
the other evening, what would
you go look for on an
80-year-old aerial photograph
here in the state of Wisconsin,
kind of a big thing, an older
friend of mine said, "I'd go
"look for the ore pier, the
iron ore pier out of Ashland,"
because he said they
just tore it down,
the last height of it,
in 2013.
But, in fact, as we'll see,
there were more than one.
And so, if we actually go and
zoom to the city of Ashland...

And come in here
a little closer.

What you'll see coming up
and looking over here
is that here, in fact, are
three of those iron ore peers
that went out into
Lake Superior.
And in looking up a little
history about these piers,
I determined that this
southernmost one, just a little
bit above our mouse here, was
actually the Soo Line iron ore
pier and was the last one
that was around in Ashland.
It was built around,
between 1913 and 1916
when the iron ore industry
was really booming.
And it was built
by a combination
of the Minneapolis/St. Paul
and Sault Ste Marie
rail lines.
And the way that these piers
worked is that they would take
the iron ore that was being mined in the Upper Peninsula of
Michigan and bring it on trains
over to the Ashland piers.
And then these trains
would actually drive
all the way out on these piers.
And these piers, the last one
before they took it down,
it was 80 feet tall
and 60 feet wide
and extended 1800 feet
into Lake Superior.
At the time, in the 1960s when
it was discontinued in use, it
was considered to be the largest
single concrete structure in the
United States just by virtue of
the amount of concrete in it.
But the way that these worked is
that the train would actually
drive all the way out onto
the pier, and then they had
emptying holes in the bottom
of the train cars.
And these piers, at
80 feet and 60 feet,
had big holding containers
right inside of the pier.
And so the train cars would drop
their ore out of the bottom into
these holding tanks, and then
the ships would drive up, you
can see they're long enough to
have even more than one ship
docked at a time, would come and
there were chutes that would
come out of the side of the pier
and fill up the iron ore ships.
As I was telling Jaime this
story from doing the research
around it, we were looking at
these photos and I wondered to
myself, I'm not going to be able
to point with the mouse, but if
you look directly north of the
mouse, there's a little blip on
this photo, and we kind of
wondered, I wonder if that's a
ship actually leaving the pier.
And so, beyond our own
application which you can view
these photos and download them,
we do also link back to the UW
Digital Collections viewer,
which, while it does not show
you on a map, it does allow
you to do a few more things
that ours doesn't quite,
including zoom in on
the non-transparent
version of the photo.
And I think you'll see that
if we zoom in really tightly,
and if we can find it, that we
could convince ourselves that,
in fact, that is a ship
leaving the pier.
And so just the sheer
resolution in a digital form
based on what you can discover.
This is better than my glasses
with another set of glasses
could do on that original photo.
And so, but it's
really quite amazing.
And if, again, you didn't want
to download a whole photo but
you just had a little piece that
you really wanted to capture,
you can use this alternate
way to download,
and you could just go and right click and save the image,
just a little clip-out
from one of these photos.
And so there are multiple ways
to get out and download as well
as hopefully explore and truly
enjoy this whole collection.
And I know that we've really
enjoyed both doing the research
and coming here to
talk to you about it.
And with that, that's the
end of our presentation
and demonstration, and we
hope you'll go look at
all kinds of photos tonight.
[laughter]
[applause]