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Date: Thursday, September 21st, 2023
Location: Newberry Library – Baskes Hall
Title: The Evolution of the Road Atlas, 100 Years in the Making.
Speakers: Steve Wiertz, Cartographic Researcher at Rand McNally
Summary: The presentation, led by Steve Wiertz of Rand McNally, will cover the evolution of the Road Atlas from its start in the early 1900s to the current digital age in the 21st century. It will outline changes in map specification techniques, map production methods, and research methodologies.
Biography: Steve Wiertz is a graduate of Illinois State University with a major in Geography and has earned two GIS Certifications, one from Elmhurst University and the other from the College of DuPage. He is currently employed as a GIS Senior Analyst with Rand McNally Publishing in Chicago, Illinois. He has been working with the Rand McNally Road Atlas in different capacities throughout the last 30 years including as primary Cartographic Researcher during the last 12 years. Steve has developed innovative solutions for annually reviewing highways, roads, and points of interest within a customized database containing hundreds of thousands of features. Road conditions change quickly, and points of interest frequently fluctuate with closings, openings, and name changes. In his spare time, Steve enjoys biking, kayaking, fishing, gardening, and planning trips involving a lot of outdoor activities.
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Date: Thursday, October 19th, 2023
Location: Newberry Library – Baskes Hall/Zoom Online Webinar
Title: Chicago Reflected: A Skyline Drawing from the Chicago River
Speakers: Ryan Chester, a Chicago-based architect
Summary: The COVID‐19 pandemic provoked Ryan to start a challenging project – to document scrupulously the street‐front views along the entire length of the Chicago River within Downtown – from Lake Michigan along the main and south branches of the river. Starting from March 2020 and over a period of six months he spent at least one hour daily on drawing his project – moving methodically and deterministically from left to right along a single roll of paper 2’ high and 55’ long. As completed, the drawing represents a unique story of dozens of accurately depicted buildings, as seen from multiple perspectives. This presentation to the Chicago Map Society will focus on how the drawing was created as an elevational map of Chicago as opposed to seeing the city as a plan.
Biography: Ryan Chester, a Chicago‐based architect spends his free time drawing the city he loves; he sees Chicago, particularly its thrilling towers, as the ultimate symbol of architectural ambition and creativity, a special place he dreamed one day to call home since childhood, while growing up in the nearby Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Working as a project architect in the heart of Chicago, Chester would typically devote most of his lunch hours to drawing the street scenes and buildings’ facades of the city around him.
Ryan graduated with a masters degree in Architecture from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee (UWM) in 2005. Upon graduation he worked in New York and London before moving to Chicago in 2011. He is currently working as a project architect at JGMA as well as teaching at his alma mater UWM as an adjunct professor.
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Date: Thursday, November 16th, 2023
Location: Ruggles Hall – Newberry Library
Title: Race, Power, and Cartography
Speakers: Ricardo Padron and Risa Puleo
Description: This program will explore the relationship between maps and race in two different cartographic projects from the early modern period: a set of richly-detailed world maps created by the French mapmaker Nicolas de Fer in the 1690s; and a map of a region around the town of Tultepec made by an anonymous Indigenous inhabitant of colonial Mexico to support a legal case against a Spanish rancher.
Ricardo Padrón will use the de Fer maps to explain how Western ideas about race developed in tandem with ideas about global geography, showing how the depiction of different peoples around the world laid the groundwork for theories of biological race in the eighteenth century. Risa Puleo then turns to the Indigenous map of Tultepec, showing how this map (and others like it) functioned as tools in the effort to resist racialized notions of property ownership that colonizers used to dispossess and displace Indigenous communities.
Speaker Biographies: Ricardo Padrón is a Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia known for his research on the early modern cartographic imagination, tracing the relationship between mapping space, telling stories, and forging identities. He is the author of two books, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (2004) and The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (2020). Both were published by the University of Chicago Press. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Risa Puleo is a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University. Her dissertation follows the Iberian Churra—the breed of Spanish sheep featured in the Farmers vs Corvarribuas map that she wrote about for the “Seeing Race Before Race” exhibition—and objects made from its wool into Central Mexico in the 16th, the American Southwest in the 19th, and into New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the early 20th century.
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Date: Thursday, December 21st, 2023
Location: Ruggles Hall – Newberry Library
Title: Annual Holiday Gala
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Date: Thursday, January 18th, 2024
Location: Ruggles Hall – Newberry Library
Title: Bathymetry: 20th and 21st Century Map Poetics
Speaker: Emily Barton Altman
This creative and critical presentation will feature Altman’s map poetry. Altman will read her work and then trace the map and score-based practices that inform her writing. Beginning with 20th-century avant-garde practices and ending with contemporary work, Altman will show how writers and artists of the 20th and 21st centuries used maps in their poetry to interrogate space, politics, and everyday life.
Emily Barton Altman is the author of two chapbooks, “Bathymetry” (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016), and “Alice Hangs Her Map” (dancing girl press, 2019). Recent poems appear in The Spectacle, Bone Bouquet, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver.
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Date: Thursday, February 15th, 2024
Location: Ruggles Hall – Newberry Library
Title: Gerhard Mercator’s sacred geographies during the Reformation
Speaker: Danielle Gravon
Studies on the sixteenth-century map maker Gerhard Mercator privilege his contributions to geography, navigation, and geomagnetism over his theological, which was at the crux of his world concept. Mercator is treated as a somewhat marginal figure in the development of sacred geography, but there is evidence suggesting that he played a central role in the burgeoning genre.
We will trace the evolution of Mercator’s exegetical cartography from the beginning of his career to the end through three case studies – his maps of the Holy Land, Europe, and a world in his Atlas. These examples, read alongside publications by his contemporaries, private correspondence, and entries in the Plantin-Moretus Archives from 1558-1599, show that Mercator’s biblical maps were highly sought after and copied.
Danielle Gravon is an art historian of early modern Netherlandish art with special interest in scientific images, particularly maps. She is the Director of Exhibitions at Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM), and she teaches studio art and art history at MSUM, Concordia College, and Minnesota State Community and Technical College.
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Date: Thursday, March 21st, 2024
Location: Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library/Zoom Presentation Online
Title: Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County
Speaker: Anne Bonds
Description: Mapping Racism and Resistance: Racial covenants and struggles over real estate in the urban north
Speaker Bio: Anne Bonds is Professor and Associate Chair of Geography and an affiliate faculty of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a critical human geographer whose research interests include race, racialization, and racial segregation, urban political economy and community development, and housing studies. She is an editor of the journal Urban Geography and is past-Chair of the Urban Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Her work is published in a variety of outlets, including The Annals of the AAG, Progress in Human Geography, Urban Geography, and the Sociological Review. Professor Bonds was the recipient of the 2022 American Association of Geographer’s Ruby and Wilbur Miller Award, recognizing her contributions to the field of geography.
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Date: Thursday, April 18th, 2024
Location: Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library/Zoom Presentation Online
Title: Government Mapping in Early Modern Venice
Speaker: Karen-edis Barzman
Description: In 1460 the Venetian republic mandated something unprecedented – the systematic mapping of its territories, combining quantitative and qualitative data in “true pictures” to be archived and consulted in the inner chambers of government. This rejection of stand-alone text (list, itinerary, narrative) was soon justified when drawings began arriving with vast amounts of information delivered at a glance. Rather than efficiency, however, the logic behind the initiative was that visualizing geospatial knowledge would obviate ambiguities about places far away and accelerate consensus in the centralized management of the empire.
The 1460 mandate was featured in Volume 3 (2007) of the monumental History of Cartography, but its scope was misrepresented, and the maps (produced for 350 years) are still little known today. We will look at the maps’ gradual shift from verisimilitude toward abstraction and their functionality (distinct from that of print maps), assessing their complex overlays, data accuracy, intended purposes, patterns of use, necessary hardware, and methods of indexing, storage, and access in classified chanceries at the Ducal Palace in Venice – a sprawling information environment behind the scenes.
Speaker Bio: Karen-edis Barzman is an Emeritus Professor of Art History. Trained as an early modern Italianst, she works in a number of interdisciplinary fields (spatial history, history of cartography, media studies, digital humanities). Author of numerous publications, she is currently a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library and teaches at various universities in Chicago.
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Date: Thursday, May 16th, 2024
Location: Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library/Zoom Presentation Online
Title: Games on Maps
Speaker: Wilbert Stroeve
Remember Risk? It was very likely the first time that we heard of Yakutsk and Irkutsk. Sound familiar? These remote Siberian regions are featured in one of the most popular board games ever, Risk, invented in 1957. Over the years Wilbert has played many board games, such as Risk, Rail Baron, Civilization, Settlers of Catan, etc. that involve a map-like board. He will explore the early history of board games and continue on to those that resemble a map. Wilbert Stroeve was born in The Netherlands and immigrated with his family to California as a boy in 1959.
After graduating from University, Wilbert moved back to The Netherlands for a programming job, which led to a position in Chicago. A map enthusiast since first grade, Mr. Stroeve has served on the Chicago Map Society board for many years, including as president.