 In your newest exhibit is Women in Cartography. Tell us a little bit about the exhibit. This exhibit was curated by Alice Hudson, who was the director of the map department at the New York Public Library for 35 years. Long been a passion of hers and Yolanda Tennyson, the former curator here at the Osher Map Library, to have an exposition on the role of women in cartography as it's largely as in other fields such as science and architecture been hidden from the historical record. So this exhibit explores 400 years of women's contributions in cartography going all the way from early colorists and cartoosh makers all the way to modern GIS. And how did they get involved in cartography in the first place? Women were usually involved in cartography through their families and their husbands. Some of them were publishers or engravers in their own right, but largely businesses, especially in the 18th and 17th centuries, were family oriented. And so they would take over as engravers, colorists, publishers usually as widows after their husbands died. They would keep the business going for a number of years and decades. Were they self-taught? The majority of them were either apprenticed or taught by their husbands or other members of the firms. There are some women in the exhibit from the early periods up until the 20th century that were self-taught but for the most part it's consistent with the culture of the time where they would have been apprenticed or learned from somebody else in the shop. And many of these women were not able to be publicly known. They used their initials etc. to hide their gender. Is that right? There are a few examples of the early women in this exhibit from before 1900 that did use their full names. For the most part a lot of them due to social constraints and economic reasons used their initials, especially when their initials were close to that of a man that was also represented in the field. So the majority of them did have to hide their full identity. And that's why Mary Ann Roke. Tell us about her story. Mary Ann Roke made this map which is a general chart of North America in 1761 which was shortly after she took over after her husband John Roke died. It's signed MA Roke which is pretty typical of the time, especially the 18th century. What's important is that she continued the business for a number of years after her husband's death and actually built a name for herself as a publisher. And when Alice Hudson started doing research into the history of women cartography, MA Roke was the only name that she was given by reference librarian at the New York Public Library. That one name led it to expand into Mary Ann Roke which led Alice down a hopeful path of finding more women that created maps especially in the 18th and 17th centuries. And for Mary Ann and other cartographers of the time, where did she get the actual information? She drew the map, but where did the information to draw the map come from? The information usually for these maps in the mid-18th century was compiled from a number of previous maps, manuscript surveys published charts and other kind of compiled things. Numerous parts of them were copied somewhat directly from other map makers that had been going on for over a century. So it's kind of a compilation as opposed to an original piece. And where do they get that information from? Do they do their own research themselves? Do they approach people and ask questions? How does that work? The publishing houses usually very little of the research themselves, usually returning sea captains, people that they knew who had been doing surveys, they would sometimes go there was a place in the government, especially for the United Kingdom, where the majority of charts and maps that came back from the New World were housed and so you could go in there. You could also just buy plates from a previous publishing company if they passed away and then take that information and put it on your own. There was some crowned copyright at this time but it was kind of lacks in certain regards so there were ways to get more information than you could legally. At that time there was so much exploration going on. I assume that the maps could have been changed almost monthly I would assume. They were definitely changed monthly. This map in particular has a very large unknown section of the Northwestern portion of the United States. It also has some very curious geography once you get above Labrador. So it's not but it fills in those spaces that aren't known with a lot of text from descriptions, from journals and diaries of people who had been there so it kind of creates this cartographic fantasy but it is surrounded by a scientific reality. Ian, we're now up to 1895 and this is a very different kind of map that we're looking at now. Yes, this is from the Hall House Papers. This is by Agnes Sinclair Holbrook 1895. This is the first cartographic representation used in the social sciences in North America. These maps and the accompanying surveys and charts that were produced in the book by the Hall House in the Near East Side of Chicago was intended to show scientifically and visually the impact that having tenements full of newly arrived immigrants, poor people and people who were working 24 hours instead of going to school or engaged in other social activities influenced not only those people's health but also the health of the city. And what kind of impact did these maps have on the social perceptions and the economics of the town? They actually had far-reaching implications outside of Chicago as well. These were primarily responsible as a fundamental portion of passing the acts against child workers and also was the first step in an institutional knowledge of how confining people into tenements actually negatively impacted not only those people but also the fabric of society. Many people think of maps, they change perceptions of people, they change their view of the world geographically but these kind of maps really change people's perceptions of the world sociologically and everything else, is that right? That is correct. Not only sociologically as far as the academics go but as you can see from the maps here, the bright colors, the easy legends combined with the scientific knowledge and the narrative that's in the book they provided a comprehensive picture based on the cartography that changed not only people's minds about what immigrants were, what identities were about child labor laws but also about what that meant for them, their families and those that might not be immediately affected and caused a broader nationwide knowledge and concern about these issues. You're standing in front of a large map of the Indian Ocean but it's not the map that you could see if you're looking down at the ocean. What is it? In 1964 that was created by Marie Tharp and Bruce Heeson. This is a physiographic diagram of the Indian Ocean. So what you see behind me here is the actual ocean floor. This was from a series of researches and charts that were made by Marie Tharp and Bruce Heeson which is the first scientific mapping of the entire ocean floor. Those maps were extremely important in the scientific community. They are what proved the theory of tectonics was not just a theory but was actual fact and elevated Marie's role and the role of women not just as researchers but also as scientists that should be taken seriously. And where did the information for this map come from? The information was largely conducted by Bruce Heeson. At that point in time women were not allowed on research vessels and submarines so Marie Tharp even though she was a well regarded geologist was relegated to data collection, crunching the numbers afterwards and creating the maps. There was another, a couple of other places that they got earthquake data and things like that but primarily it was through observation. Now this is a very large map and it's quite detailed. How long would a map like this take to make? It took them a number of, I think about 15 to 25 years to complete making everything after the initial surveys were started. Obviously this is just the Indian Ocean so there's also a few more of these maps and they're all pretty large and very very detailed. Ian we're at the end of our tour here and we're in the 21st century with the computers and map making. Tell us about this part of the exhibit. This part of the exhibit highlights the expanding role that women have in GIS or geographical information systems. This highlights the work of two women, Ann Kelly Knowles and Claire Kedowski. And at this point in time we've moved from the beginning of the exhibit where women are hiding behind their initials due to social constraints and economic realities and kind of working in the shadows but still being very important to having women out front and being a majority of a field. And so here we've moved away from kind of that hiddenness and more to an out front groundbreaking kind of force. And what are some of the examples of that in this computer display? Ann Kelly Knowles work that's displayed here is referencing the Battle of Gettysburg and doing a GIS rendering of the terrain of that area and seeing if it played any role in the decisions that were made in the battles. Claire Kedowski who is a graduate of the main university system works for Kappa mapping here in Maine and it has a variety of her work using both LiDAR and GIS to show what's possible throughout the field. So even 150 years later after the Battle of Gettysburg there's still information to be gleaned using mapping. One of the great things that GIS has done is we've been able to combine it with historic maps and a number of people are doing this around the world and the information that you can get from combining the early cartographic items with a 99.9% accurate scientific result is very eye-opening in very, very many ways. You can use them to compare the accuracy of coastlines or boundaries and then indeed to look beyond what the eye can see and analyze it from a more scientific background. And tell us about the exhibit. How long is it here for? The exhibit is until October 24th and we are open Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and then on Saturday.