Remember that house your grandparents lived in?

Daniel Sanborn, a surveyor in the 19th century, had built an outstanding reputation for creating maps, initially fire maps that insurance companies used to assess fire risk in urban areas (fraudulent claims were a problem even then). He founded the Sanborn Map Company, and its work across the US became a valuable resource in documenting urban growth. Times changed, and the tools of the trade changed, yet the early Sanborn maps continued to offer valuable information, albeit no longer for insurance assessment, but rather for their historical significance. Today, using machine learning and digitization, researchers at Ohio State have turned