In the long history of mapmaking, computers are a relatively new development. In some ways, computers have fundamentally changed how cartographers create, interpret, and share spatial data; in others, they simply mark a new chapter in how people have always processed the world. This exhibition features objects from the Leventhal Center’s unique collections in the history of digital mapping to explore how computers and cartographers changed one another, particularly since the 1960s. By comparing maps made with computers to those made before and without them, the exhibition invites us to recognize the impacts of digital mapping for environmental management, law and policy, navigation, national defense, social change, and much more. Visitors will be encouraged to consider how their own understanding of geography might be translated into the encodings and digital representations that are essential to processing place with a computer.

The online version of the exhibition is here.

A new exhibition at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Heaven and Earth: The Blue Maps of China, focuses on two extraordinary Chinese maps from the early 19th century printed using Prussian blue pigment.

These maps were presented in an extraordinary format, on eight vertical sheets printed in the style of rubbings. Even more strikingly, they were rendered in a rich blue coloring. The pigment Prussian blue had recently begun to be produced in China, and these maps were amongst the first printed objects in East Asia to make use of the colorant—predating the famous use of Prussian blue by Japanese print artists soon after.

The blue maps were more than just visually astonishing. They also captured Chinese ideas about the relationship between terrestrial and celestial space, and still provide insight today into how Chinese scholars and artists conceptualized the world around them. Beautiful and powerful in equal measure, these blue maps capture details of a transitional moment in the history of China—and the wider world. This exhibition considers these two maps in the context of their production, consumption, and functionality, revealing them as unique objects in the global history of mapmaking.

The online version is full of interesting detail about the maps’ materials and production. The physical exhibition opened last weekend and runs until 31 August 2024. Free admission.

Every map is a representation of reality, and every representation, no matter how accurate and honest, involves simplification, symbolization, and selective attention. Even when a map isn’t actively trying to deceive its readers, it still must reduce the complexity of the real world, emphasizing some features and hiding others. Compressing the round globe onto a flat sheet of paper, and converting places, people, and statistics into symbols, lines, and colors is a process inherently fraught with distortion. […]

In Bending Lines: Maps and Data From Distortion to Deception, we explore the many ways in which maps have “bent” reality and created a picture of the world that is oftentimes more real than reality itself. Some of the maps in this exhibition are deliberately nefarious, created by people or institutions who are trying to mislead or persuade. But for many of the others, the relationship between map and truth is more ambiguous. Some maps dim a certain type of truth in order to let another type of interpretation shine through, while others classify and categorize the world in ways that should raise our skepticism. And for some of the maps shown here, the persuasive goal isn’t trickery but liberation, as they seek to raise awareness of truths that were previously obscured or oppressed.

This exhibition was to have launched last month, but thanks to the pandemic has had to go fully online. Tackling everything from persuasive cartography to map projections to the sort of thing Mark Monmonier talks about in How to Lie with Maps, it’s an enormous undertaking in more than one sense. CityLab’s Laura Biss interviews the Leventhal’s curator, Garrett Dash Nelson, about the exhibition.

Update, 2 July: Harvard Magazine looks at the exhibition.

During the 19th century, the United States expanded dramatically westward. Immigrant settlers rapidly spread across the continent and transformed it, often through violent or deceptive means, from ancestral Native lands and borderlands teeming with diverse communities to landscapes that fueled the rise of industrialized cities. Historical maps, images and related objects tell the story of the sweeping changes made to the physical, cultural, and political landscape. Moving beyond the mythologized American frontier, this map exhibition explores the complexity of factors that shaped our country over the century.

As usual, there’s a comprehensive online version, which is peppered with acknowledgements of the very white, very settler-colonialist perspective of the maps on display. Which are, of course, justified, but as far as I can see they’re asterisks and asides on an otherwise unchanged exhibit.

Update, 24 October: Here’s a writeup from the Boston Globe.

Breathing Room: Mapping Boston’s Green Spaces is the latest exhibition put on by the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.

Boston boasts some of the nation’s most recognizable and cherished green spaces, from Boston Common, to the Emerald Necklace, to hundreds of neighborhood parks, playgrounds, tot lots, community gardens, playing fields, cemeteries, and urban wilds. In this exhibition, you will learn how the country’s oldest public park grew from a grazing pasture to an iconic recreational and social center, how 19th-century reformers came to view parks as environmental remedies for ill health, how innovative landscape architects fashioned green oases in the midst of a booming metropolis, and what the future holds for Boston’s open spaces. As you explore three centuries of open space in Boston, perhaps you will feel inspired to go outside and discover the green spaces in your own backyard.

The online version is here. It opened last Saturday and runs until 23 September; for some reason the opening ceremony isn’t until April 3rd.

Along with Regions and Seasons (previously), the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center is hosting another exhibition, Who We Are: Boston Immigration Then and Now, which runs until 26 August. “This exhibition compares the landscape of today’s ‘new’ Boston with that of over 100 years ago. The maps and graphics on display here show where Boston’s foreign-born residents originate from, and where newer immigrant groups have settled, while celebrating who we are, and the vibrant diversity that is Boston.” Text is in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Chinese and Vietnamese.

April 19th: The day the Leventhal Map Center finally snapped.

The Northwest Passage: Navigating Old Beliefs and New Realities opens 29 September 2016 at the Osher Map Library in Portland, Maine. [WMS]

Mapping Australia: Country to Cartography runs from 4 October 2016 to 15 January 2017 at the AAMU Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art in Utrecht, Netherlands. The exhibition “will explore the different representations of Australia. Alongside the VOC’s historical maps of Australia’s coast, drawn by Dutch cartographers in the 17th and 18th centuries, are striking depictions of the country in contemporary art works of Aboriginal artists that are derived from thousands of years of traditions.” [WMS]

Another look at #MapMonsterMonday: This afternoon, Dory Klein of the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center spoke with Public Radio International’s The World about sea monsters on old maps.

Previously: The Boston Globe on #MapMonsterMonday; Bailey Henderson’s Sea Monster Sculptures.

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A few books about women in cartography:

• Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt (Henry Holt, 2012), a biography of oceanographer Marie Tharp (Amazon, iBooks)
• Mrs. P’s Journey: The Remarkable Story of the Woman Who Created the A-Z Map by Sarah Hartley (2001), a biography of A-Z Map Company founder Phyllis Pearsall (Amazon UK)
• Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography by Will C. van den Hoonaard (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), a scholarly history of women mapmakers since the 16th century (Amazon)

Previously: Two More Map Books; Soundings: A Biography of Marie Tharp; The Urban Legend of Phyllis Pearsall; Phyllis Pearsall.

After Forbes Smiley was sentenced to 3½ years in prison for stealing nearly 100 maps from a number of different libraries, and maps were returned to the libraries he stole them from, there were still some missing pieces to the puzzle. There were maps in Smiley’s possession that had not been claimed; there were maps missing from libraries that Smiley did not admit to stealing, though he was recorded as the last person to see the map before it went missing.

Several institutions, including Yale, Harvard, the New York Public Library and the Boston Public Library, published lists of their missing maps. First on the BPL’s list was a copy of the Carte géographique de la Nouvelle-France, a map of northeastern North America compiled in 1612 by Samuel de Champlain. (Harvard was also missing a copy of the same map; when one example hit the auction block in 2008 there was some question of it being Harvard’s, but it turned out not to be so.)

Last year, though, the BPL caught a break. A copy of the Champlain map turned up in an antique dealer’s catalogue with identifying marks that matched a digital image of the map made by the BPL in 1992. After some wrangling, the dealer, who’d priced the map at $285,000, returned the map to the library. The news broke last December: read the Boston Globe story and the BPL’s media release.

Since then it’s been on display at the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Central Library in Copley Square. It’ll be there through this month (the 29th according to the website, the 19th according this tweet) so you’ve got until then to have a look for yourself.

During The Map Room’s first iteration I posted 112 blog entries about map thefts, more than half of which were about the Forbes Smiley affair. For a book-length account of the Smiley case, read The Map Thief by Michael Blanding, which I reviewed when it came out. Amazon (Canada, U.K.) | iBooks (audiobook)

Previously: Mapping the American Revolution.