Digitization

After significant time using quaddresses in a real application, I reflect on their effectiveness.

Newspapers were donated to The Town of Woodhull New York by Steve and Amy Farrand after they were discovered in the attic of a West Main Street home they owned at the time. The collection is comprised mostly of The Woodhull Sentinel in the 1930’s, including its very first issue on June 5, 1930, which promised a “bang-up good paper” to serve the “folks of Woodhull, Jasper and the vicinity”. Leslie Smith, Woodhull Community Historian collected these newspapers, adding a few dozen more issues previously donated from multiple sources, and along with Adam Smith, oversaw their digitization and preservation by Backstage Library Works in Bethlehem PA in 2025.

397 total issues, typically 8 pages per issue, 3,144 total pages:

Known publishing information for The Woodhull Sentinel:

• Published: weekly
• Publisher: Southern Tier News Inc., Addison NY
• First Issue: June 5, 1930
• Last Issue: exact date unknown
• By August 3, 1939, The Woodhull Sentinel had been subsumed under The Addison Advertiser to become The Addison Advertiser and The Woodhull Sentinel. That issue is volume 80 (“LXXX”), indicating that The Addison Advertiser began publication in 1860.

Quadrant Addressing or Quaddressing provides an intuitive and consistent way to make relative spatial references to an original, two dimensional artifact (primarily for documents such as a printed text, photographs, etc.) regardless of its size or shape, or whether the artifact is physical or digital. Quaddressing relies on imprecision to aid human judgement instead of relying on highly precise measurements of varying units across different types of documents, thereby greatly increasing the ease and efficiency of both recording and interpretation across all documents for both human actors and code.