About the Project

Working in close coordination with UChicago Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship and the “Mapping Chicagoland” initiative, The Chicago Urban Heritage Project aims to digitize historic fire insurance maps from Chicago to create an historically accurate and downloadable building footprint data layers (with related metadata). Led by the Center for Digital Scholarship’s inaugural post-bacc fellow and University of Pennsylvania urban planning master’s student Parker Otto, each cohort of undergraduate researchers will work to empower next-generation historical scholarship on Chicago’s built environment. Researchers will learn applied skills in Python and QGIS in a hands-on, project-focused environment that seeks to change the way academics, city officials, and everyday people understand the continuities (and often-dramatic changes) in Chicago’s built environment over the past century. Interested in this project? Contact Parker via parkerotto@uchicago.edu for more information.