For those of you who wonder what I've been up to this year, and of course I'm wondering that myself some days, I've been working a lot on analyzing the housing market during the Great Depression. This all dates back to me going to College Park, MD last summer and taking thousands of photos at the National Archives, though of course through the grant that my adviser got, so I definitely can't take much credit. Anyways...

Some of the photos I took during my trip to the National Archives last summer were of various maps that indicated survey neighborhoods. These surveys contained a lot of neighborhood level information that we can do some pretty cool stuff with. Anyways, a side project of mine which may be useful in my dissertation is to digitize some of the old maps. My initial work has been in New York City, which unfortunately a hired gun took some not so fantastic photos of the maps . However they are mostly good enough to get started on digitizing. Anyways, take a look at the photo that I uploaded where I'm transferring the old map of Staten Island onto Google Earth. It is a bit tedious, but surprisingly a lot of fun (at least for me).

-Trevor

It has been a while since I've consistently posted, but I thought I wanted to let those who read this know about a classmate of mine who has some tough luck recently. For those who don't know Steve, he's got to be one of the greatest guys that I've known who always has something good to say about everybody. Furthermore he knows of and has been to St. Joseph, MN, so that instantly puts him in a league of his own. Anyways, earlier this year he was diagnosed with cancer on his tongue which spread to his lymph nodes. What's worse is that it has now spread to his lungs.

Anyways, I basically hope that if you get a second, check out his blog: http://stevenmanos.blogspot.com and make sure to keep him in your thoughts.

-Trevor