THURSDAY, 16 JANUARY 2025
Location: Zoom, 7:00 PM ET/6:00 PM CT/ 5:00 PM MT/4:00 PM PT
Title: A Look Behind “Processing Place: How Computers and Cartographers Redrew our World”
Speakers: Ian Spangler, Assistant Curator of Digital and Participatory Geography, and Emily Bowe, Assistant Director, Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center, Boston Public Library.
This talk provides a curator’s overview of the latest exhibition from the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, Processing Place. The exhibition explores the rise of computer cartography and early geographic information systems by way of physical maps created with digital software. The exhibit encourages readers and visitors to consider “processing” in a historical sense: that is, not only in terms of digital computation, but as one part of a vibrant and ever-changing cartographic process. Through objects dated largely between 1960 and 1990, Processing Place highlights how computer-assisted mapmaking techniques helped combine maps with spatial data, perform calculations, and use them to tell geographic stories. By focusing on this period of computerized mapmaking, the exhibit draws attention to the importance of libraries and other map-collecting institutions to archive digitally created physical maps from this time period. Processing Place also emphasizes that computer-made maps from this era of mapmaking can help us to better understand the digital maps that show up most often in our modern everyday lives.
Link to digital exhibition: https://www.leventhalmap.org/digital-exhibitions/processing-place/
Bios:
Ian Spangler is a cultural and economic geographer with interests in digital mapping, housing studies, and race and landscape in the United States. He earned his BA in English and Geography from the University of Mary Washington. He also holds an MA and PhD in Geography, both from the University of Kentucky. His doctoral research examined geographical standards for exchanging information about real estate, with a particular focus on how those standards shape the design and use of contemporary digital real estate technologies.
Emily Bowe is a designer, cartographer, and researcher with interests in maps, urban infrastructure, and community data practices. She graduated from Parsons School of Design at The New School with an MS in Design and Urban Ecologies and from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain Scholar with a BS in Environmental Science and Geography.
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When: January 16, 2025, 07:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
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