My won­der twin buddy Andy has an arti­cle in the inau­gural issue of The Code4Lib Jour­nal, a pub­li­ca­tion that arose out of the Code4Lib con­fer­ence and com­mu­nity. Andy does a lot of work to dig­i­tize and make infor­ma­tion about the his­toric Pull­man dis­trict in Chicago avail­able online, almost entirely as a labor of love and with no real finan­cial or admin­is­tra­tive sup­port. To me, he is an unsung hero of the dig­i­tal world, and I am proud to call him my friend.

Con­nect­ing the Real to the Rep­re­sen­ta­tional: His­tor­i­cal Demo­graphic Data in the Town of Pull­man, 1880–1940

“The Pull­man House His­tory Project is a part of the Pull­man State His­toric Site’s vir­tual museum and web site (http://www.pullman-museum.org/) which links together cen­sus, city direc­tory, and tele­phone direc­tory infor­ma­tion to describe the peo­ple who lived in the town of Pull­man, Illi­nois between 1881 and 1940. This demo­graphic data is linked through a database/XML record sys­tem to online maps and Perl pro­grams that allow the data to be rep­re­sented in var­i­ous use­ful com­bi­na­tions. This arti­cle describes the struc­ture of the data­base and XML records, as well as the meth­ods and code used to link the parts together and dis­play the data.”