 The talk we cancelled on February 20th is going to be next week, and the talk is at Anna Weiss. Thank you for asking me. From the Vermont Committee for Refugees at the University, she's an appointment and a settlement counselor. So she's going to talk about what's cooking in Vermont. I'm very glad to...whoop! I'm a lost geographer. Because I love maths. How many people love maths? These are your people. And atlases and globes, especially old ones. But I have to say I'm intrigued by the title, right? What does that mean? And then, of course, here's his bio. Bill Morris is a cartographer. And I was thinking of doing what that meant. And a senior analyst at Faraday, where he builds practical data plumbing and digs for geographic patterns. I look both of those up, and I'm not willing to go any further than that. So, I'm very glad to have you. It's actually been working. This is great. Yeah, thank you very much for having me, Michelle, and for the Ollie crew. I appreciate you all coming in the middle of your day here. My name is Bill Morris. I am indeed an analyst for a company called Faraday in Burlington. We are a data science company. So most of my day does actually feel like plumbing. It's taking one source of data, trying to hook it up to another one and get them to do things in one direction and generally avoid leaks. That's what my current job entails. I am a cartographer by trade for about 20 years. I've been making maps in one form or another, which is certainly, I'm idling in the history of cartography, but we're going to get into that a little bit as we go forward. I love talking about maps, and I kind of ramble a lot about maps. So if anybody catches me rambling on a particular slide, just throw something at me and I'll get back on track. But what I hope to do today is go through a series of vignettes about mapping with sort of kaleidoscoping forward and backward in history. I hope it's going to make a certain amount of sense because it's unified around the central theme that is what certain maps mean to me. So I'm just going to start with a quote from Jose Saramago. So the virtue of maps, they show it can be done with limited space. They foresee that everything can happen therein. Jose Saramago was a magical realist author. He wrote this book. Yeah, exactly. Totally. And this book comes from a book where the central plot is the Iberian Peninsula has broken off of mainland Europe and started floating out into the Atlantic. And of course, yeah, magical realists have to do something like that. But the many different political and cultural and social implications that come out of that are astonishing. It's a map or a great framework of imagination. And then just because we're briefly mentioning the work of magical realism, I have to point out one of Cartagena's favorite quotes is a paragraph long short story by Jorge Luis Borges. It's called On Exactitude in Science. And he wrote it as though it were a fragment of a longer piece written by an explorer in the 17th century. And he writes, In that empire, the art of cartography attains such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the entirety of a city. And the map of the empire, the entirety of a province. In time, those unconscionable maps no longer satisfy. And the cartographers' guilds struck a map of the empire. Whose size was that of the empire? And which coincided point for point with it. The following generations who were not so fond of the study of cartography as their forebears had been saw that the vast map was useless and not without some pitilessness was it that they delivered it up to the inclement seas of sun and winter. In the deserts of the west, still today, there are tattered ruins of that map inhabited by animals and beggars. In all the land, there is no other relic than the disciplines of geography. What I like about that one is that he really foretold a position that we find ourselves in today. We do have a one-to-one map today. We have a digital one-to-one map. And by the end of this talk, I hope to give you a few examples of what that means and what some of the implications of it are. But first order of business is to show the maps that I'm going to be discussing. These are three maps. This is a British Ordinance Survey map of the Bremen Quadrant in Germany. This is a FHA loan. There's a different term for it but I'll get to it later. You probably have a loan availability map for the city of Philadelphia. This is an aerial photo from a fragment of the New North End in Burlington. What unites them is that they were all created in 1937, which is sort of a happy accident because for lack of a better narrative, all of these maps have great personal meaning to me, despite the fact that I was definitely not alive in 1937. We're going to discuss them one by one as I mentioned, sort of go forward and back through timeline. So, first map, the Ordinance Survey loan. First, we need to go back 800 years. This is a map created in a Song Dynasty in China in 1937. Obviously, you can see it was made on clay and the primary items of interest here are rivers, waterways, there are some roads in here as well. But the general idea is this is a navigation map. What makes this a unique map is that this is one of the first instances that we have of a grid being applied to mapping. So, the way that this would have been created would have been the cartographers of the empire, like Jorge is imagining. In this case, going out to create, not a one-to-one scale, but as best they can. And in the capital, they would have laid a grid down on this general area and then sent people to each individual corner and then report what they found there combined into a large map. This is a grid transfer method that's still used today for all sorts of map expansion and contraction. But this is the first time when a cartographer is thinking in, well, not the first time, certainly, but one of the first times in which a group of cartographers were thinking beyond what they could see from ground level, thinking, how do we put all this together into a large composition? It's a good question. I don't know the GRF that's this one, so I don't even know if that's like BNC or if it's up or to Myer River. It could be anything from one to 24,000 to one to a million. I don't really know. It's certainly not one-to-one. Not even clay. We're going to advance a bit. So, the 1632, we find that map technology has changed a little bit. Navigation technology has changed a little bit. There are now concepts of latitude and longitude, although still being used in a sort of relative sense. But they allow people like our girlfriend Samuel de Champlain to be able to navigate from his home base in France all the way to the New World. And in the course of his travels, he went everywhere from to the Center de Mingo colony in the Caribbean, all the way north into what is now a Labrador in his travels. And he saw lots and lots of things, mostly from the perspective of a coastline. But when he was done with all of these travels, he returned to France. He wrote one of his memoirs. He created maps from the information that he had collected. These maps you can see are probably pretty good if you're navigating on a coastline and shit. The general sense of where one river held at his versus another all makes sense. And the tools that he would have used here would have been fairly basic. Just pens, maybe a compass for determining like approximate distance. The general idea that what was in his mind needed to be put on paper was the central act of cartage. That was what he was doing. He wasn't trying to necessarily fill in gaps in a holistic piece of global mapping. He was trying to map where he had been and convey that information to others. This obviously is not Champlain. This is a Vermeer painting called The Geographer that I love, so I use it at every opportunity I get. But it's contemporary, so maybe these are similar environments to what Champlain would have been working in. But this approach has its limits, and obviously if you even if you have a good sense of approximate latitude, like how far from the equator, how far from the poles you are, if you know the circumference of the Earth and your calculations can get you to the right place, even then you get a few things wrong. Lake Champlain doesn't really look like this. So on the previous slide you can see he actually had an arthero. The approximate projection would have been a geographic one, and he still has the orientation of the lake completely out of whack. That thing marked number 66. I've been looking all over maps. I don't know what body of water he's talking about there. But you can see that this man traveled down this lake in a canoe. On one side and then the other. You can see where the river outlets were. And he marked them. And then he had a sense of, I've been along this Atlantic coast as well. It can't be that far. White mountains, no idea. You know what, those mountains that we're seeing from Lake Champlain, those must be the White Mountains. Let's just assume it's a small band and the Atlantic's right on the other side. That's what we created when you do everything from the ground level and when you're using only an internal sense of reference. By 1750, things were getting a little bit more formalized. This is the grand survey of France done by the Cassini family in 1750. This is one of the first attempts to really lock down what latitude and longitude meant and to create an absolute sense of reference. So what they did was they walked a straight line and approximate line of longitude from Dunkirk to Barcelona along the way they triangulated. Trigonometry was never my strong suit, but I do understand that survey methods in this time and a little before and certainly almost all the way up to the present day are based on the idea that from distance you can calculate angle and from angle you can calculate distance. So knowing those things, we were able to lay down an exact line of longitude that just happened to pass through Paris and would ultimately include the site of the future Paris observatory and create an absolute reference system. The idea being that if you happen to be in Orléans, you could say Paris is exactly this distance and exactly this barrier from where I am now. This is an attempt to provide meaning on a global scale and have this system be something that could be replicated worldwide. It was such a useful system that by 1784 in the middle of what could only be described as a fairly extended period of war between France and England centuries, I don't know. They, cartographers of France and England coordinated to create a combined grant survey in order to match what had been created as separate absolute systems of latitude and longitude. And the one that we largely adopted today is the one that passed us through the Greenwich Observatory as zero. But this survey as almost like an active piece, like a gesture of its importance, locked the two together in an absolute way. So somebody standing in London could use this absolute reference system to determine how far and at what bearing the city of Paris was and indeed anything else on the world. Actually, I should say if anybody has any questions feel free to interrupt me throughout. I have the microphone so it might be kind of hard to overpower all the ranting I'm doing here. If you have questions, please. Please interrupt. By 1858, this system was being used worldwide. This is a gentleman named Everest happened to be coordinating a large-scale survey of the Himalayas, part of Britain's colonies in South Asia. In the course of doing this triangulating, incredibly difficult work, crossing the Himalayas with chains and with sites and with teams of hundreds trying to get this work done. This particular effort uncovered what was understood at that time to be the largest mountain in the world. And Mr. Everest, who was probably Lord Everest at the time, very humbly named it after himself, continued surveying more. So this method, this triangulation method of providing this absolute grid was used very far into the modern era. What was the goal in doing that mapping? The goal in doing that mapping was to be able to determine exact size and distances of an empire. And for Britain, that was... I guess the idea that they would be able to navigate and determine bearings was really like one of the fundamental underpinnings of how they collect resources from all the different corners of the empire. And if you know approximately how far it is from one trading point to another, then you can plan on a more broad scale for where should the roads go? What are the resources that need to be allocated here? In a way, there are critical geographers who can do this far better than me, but there is a really good argument to be made that surveying the land was the act of ownership. And for the British Empire, that would have been, well, we've surveyed it. We planted a flag here. This is clearly ours. Do you know the exact distance to the next town? Of course not. That means it's ours. So, yeah, there's a real colonial underpinning to the act of mapping the whole world. And this, for example, the idea that this was surveying in the field and laying down this massive grid, there's an idea that it was an adventurous sort of work. And in some ways, it probably was. This is a painting referencing an incident that happened with the German survey team in Singapore. But these people were going into lands that, to their perspective, were unknown and had not been mapped and trying to lay down some sort of reference, some sort of sense of order on it where previously it had just been a blank spot on the map for them. Obviously not a blank spot on the map for the people who live there. This is a difficult thing. So, as is the case with many technologies more advances certain types of technology faster than times of peace. The British Ordinance Survey, which was founded as a response to a Scottish rebellion in the highlands in the 18th century, was tasked in World War I with making maps of the battlefields in mainland Europe. Hundreds of surveyors died in the process of trying to actually... What these gentlemen are doing is the same sort of triangulation work that we've seen examples of so far but they're trying to do it under fire and they're trying to use it to map trench networks and towns and places that would have been important to the war effort but in the process they would have also been increasing that level of detail whereas before with every survey you would have seen maybe a one to six hundred thousand scale map these gentlemen would be mapping down to a one to five thousand scale map they'd be aiming for military action ability and in the process they'd be making some pretty cool and more broadly useful maps and the reproduction of these things also took off during World War I this is an Ordinance Survey reproduction shop that was imported entirely to France so that they could get these quadrant maps in the hands of a lieutenant on the front line as quickly as possible as they were updating them. Important from England? Yeah just that they had you know this was so central to the war effort that they would move all these resources as close as possible So I apologize I think I've jumped a few slides but one of the outgrowts of this Ordinance Survey mapping was different types of map for different types of military applications and in 1937 obviously England was concerned about a ramp up to war with Germany they issued the Ordinance Survey issued a series of maps of Germany and actually of all of mainland Europe but this was for aerial navigation they foresaw the need for buying, for navigation aids and this particular map is honestly it's one of my favorite maps but despite its pretty horrific purpose it's just a beautiful map meant for a very utilitarian intent these navigational aids you see these compasses with their specific indicators along them they're sprinkled all around the map there are probably a dozen of them in the course of a sheet that's about that big and the way that the bathymetry is rendered is beautiful in its own way but it's still a useful map if you're trying to navigate from the air to other roads you can use it to to have names attached to particular places and indeed to targets so this specific map would have been in the hands of the navigator of a B-24 flown by my grandfather who was also named Bill so in the course of a raid on a rail trestle was in the southern part of this Brennan Quadrant map his plane was shot down and he was killed some of his crew survived but he didn't and the way that the military indicated this was with exactly the same map that he'd probably carried with him this is a... I apologize for the quality of this because it's a declassified photocopy of the original so we're a few layers removed from that original somewhat beautiful map that I was talking about but the folks who the members of the squadron who survived and returned to the base reported in an after-action report that my grandfather's plane had gone down somewhere around here and the analyst who was taking this information would have asked for a precise location if available but you assume it's a squadron taking fire maybe you don't necessarily see where the crash happens but they just indicated it was somewhere in this circle and we assume all hands were lost and that action that drawing the circle on a map is frigid with so much meaning and it's... the map wasn't intended for this purpose when it was created it was an aerial navigation map but all of a sudden it has huge amounts of my family history bound up into it certain paths that were taken and others that were not and it lends a geographic significance to a place that I've never been but is incredibly important to my family and someday I'd love to go there but my German is really rusty so I don't necessarily know that we'd go away so this is the first map that I wanted to speak about that had meaning described to me this is one of the ways that a map can gain meaning and also some of the many ways that it can be created technologically some of this map the next map as I mentioned is of Philadelphia and that is where the story continues from my grandfather's death so in 1937 in Philadelphia an organization of the New Deal the FHA Federal Housing Administration they had, sorry there are so many acronyms I never exactly remember which ones means which but the FHA was tasked with making the home ownership available to Americans the idea that this is one of the most basic underpinnings of prosperity was true then and remains true now the ability to build equity to build wealth and to make it multi-generational and lasting really the federal government at this point identified that home ownership was one of the key ways to do that and they wanted to make it available to people who previously had not had access to this sort of thing so one of the ways they went about this in a practical way was with determining where they could give loans and where they couldn't this is a map of Philadelphia obviously it's a word store map this was not originally created by the FHA but the FHA took this map and drew on to it and I should say specifically a sub-agency of the FHA called the Homeowners Loan Corporation made this map but this is what they did with the map of Philadelphia you can see it's multi-colored is anybody here familiar with Philadelphia I apologize if this is welcome for my street oh yeah where are you from Logan strawberry mansion north of Philadelphia step right up yeah actually would you mind pointing out where that is the mansion right the lights out where you could see it the shelf's been like for 35 years oh yeah so oh wow thank you I don't know why yeah so wait sorry are you saying like is that a North Park street okay North Park so is this a city hall I think I think it's a city hall and then the penitentiary would be like over here somewhere yeah another penitentiary that was it oh man that penitentiary was good real estate along the building what the penitentiary's along the building it's a yeah and then it was one of the what was the it was a revolutionary time to build what's the style there's a name for it it's the idea you can see everybody everybody from the from the middle at any time penopticon it was it was designed as a penopticon I love that but you have spokeshakes exactly yeah so Ward is in the middle it's seen it's in every possible direction oh man this is the I wish I could discuss prison architecture for a long time thanks but so this is the map that the homeowners loan corporation created to guide their actions in Philadelphia and you can see that it's a thematic map it has the different colors being different things so the specific things that they meant were whether or not a loan was a good idea for a particular area so first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade and then we don't really care about the rest the first two first and second grade we all are certainly guaranteed in FHA mode third grade you might be a little bit dodgy with that you're probably going to require some specific review fourth grade settlement area was almost entirely rejected for FHA ones and this was I'm sure at the time they saw this as sort of a triage action like we can't give everybody a loan that would be crazy so they they tried to narrow down with the help of of some local input where they should go so my family's story picks up here which is in West Village so my grandmother and grandfather had lived here my grandfather died and left my grandmother to raise my mother in yeah, right about there so that's you know it's off of Thompson Street I don't remember exactly what the I don't remember exactly where the address is but they were able to get a loan for the place where they were living they were just on the border you can see I think that was the grade C area it was potentially dodgy but but worth the try so they were able to actually get a loan eventually they moved a little bit further out into media did suburbs again with a backed loan a backed mortgage and from there all sorts of things happened I don't mean to get too whimsical about this but the the idea that my grandmother could get a loan for a house there is the foundation of my own personal prosperity one of the just simple little things like I've I've never I've never gone hungry I've never had a you know a meal that I wasn't sure what I was going to get I haven't I haven't really suffered my life economically because among numerous other reasons my grandmother was able to start building equity in a home a long long time ago in the 40s and that carrying on into an ability for for her daughter for my mother to to get a college education and that college education was able to be leveraged for additional loans for home ownership when she decided to do something crazy like move from Philadelphia to Derby, Vermont I don't think she was the only one here I think that was part of the wave but from there I find that my own personal prosperity is really tied up in the fact that my grandmother was able to get an FHA loan however that makes me consider who's on the other side of that line and I'm sure most of you have have intuited this it's largely black folks who live here and throughout the life of the Homeownership Loan Corporation and their maps which would be from the 30s until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 abolished this idea the FHA was giving out loans to white folks almost exclusively to white folks and it was codified it was in these maps they asked for local input and the local input they got was from real estate agents you know police departments fire departments local councils and obviously I don't mean to gloss over the instances where it wasn't entirely about about a racial division but the way in which these racial divides persist today is astonishing today most of the folks on that side of the line are black most of the folks on that side of the line are white these things are after about 30 years of distributing loans this way these things are almost impossible to overcome and it makes me wonder who not necessarily who's left behind in the geographic sense but who's left behind on the other side of that line in an economic sense while my family went on to prosper and there are a lot of folks who are left behind but this happened nationally this was not unique to Philadelphia you'd find maps like this for Chicago for Houston for New York and you can still see the impact of it today so that was the second map actually I'm only going on time okay I'm going to get into some modern technology now so hopefully I I should leave about 15 minutes for questions is that okay? sure so the third one as I mentioned is an aerial photo of 1937 that's Burlington's New York but first we need to go back just when you thought we were advancing to the modern age this map is a clay tablet from the Babylonian city city of Nippur and it's one of the first instances that we have access to of people assigning a property survey so you see there's a road there's a river but there are also buildings and the I don't know if Q and A form is the right indication for the script there but what's written on those is the purpose of those buildings so granary temple dwelling this was a landowner a ruler of some kind in this area mapping out what they owned and this is the foundation of like the property maps that we still have today that if if you're a homeowner you have a map on the record with the city that looks not unlike this just with you know the purpose of the building and the dimensions of it and some of the other characteristics have it written in English instead of Q and A form and preferably not on clay it doesn't well actually it does keep pretty well hard to find a story it's folding it folding it up so advancing again radically into the future this idea of mapping land for individual ownership in 1798 a gentleman by the name of Ira Allen had already done a significant amount of mapping of the state and this you know Vermont in this period of time was a series of settlements from people who had migrated from Massachusetts from Connecticut on grants issued by the governor of New Hampshire prior to the Revolution Ira and his brother Ethan had run the folks with New York based land grants out of the state by that point so in the course of surveying and dividing up these towns there would have been an instance of okay so and this is just an example I don't know if this is exactly how this went for my hometown of Lindenville the town of Lindenville is a square on a map it's just divided up somewhere in an office in Connecticut and the governor has decided that this gentleman Ira Allen is going to be the one to divide that up into individual parcels and then land settlers and speculators from the cities along the coast will buy those individual parcels and then send people to Lindenville so Ira Allen's method of getting paid for this was pretty savvy he didn't generally accept cash he accepted payment in the form of a percentage of the total parcels he mapped so by the time he was done mapping a huge chunk of the state he was also the single largest landowner of the state and did certain things with that land like grant a university and that's one of the reasons we have a university in Vermont but you know he approached it in a bit of a dodgy sort of way but he was mapping these parcels so that people could have ownership and boundaries this idea of tax mapping and parcel mapping became much more formalized in the more recent era for various purposes not necessarily just for ownership this is an example of a a fire insurance map from a sand board company and this would have been this would have been this would have been in the 1930s maybe 1940 oh 1919 this is a much older one than that but you can see that there are individual things being called out on them there are purposes of the different churches and indeed the communities that they serve in fact I think does that say St. Joseph's church that's the French one it actually says French and we'll bring these there and then there would have been just a general sense of trying to nail down there's a great detail in some cases the general ice cream corporation has quite a bit written about it there and I think that's close to downtown somewhere near Maine and college even though it doesn't exist anymore obviously Ben and Jerry says long since conquered that one but the people who matched for sand board were doing it on foot for the most part they were arriving with maybe a general sense of the street grid but they would then be walking in actual dimensions of all of these dimensions of heights that's an incredibly labor intensive effort but you gain a lot of information in the process there's a quote from Daniel Carter Beard who then after working for sand board as one of their assessors go on to co-found the Boy Scouts of America his quote is while working for sand board I not only saw all those places I had heard about but I made maps of them made diagrams of all the homes in each town I looked alike and putting into my records mentioned a real occupancy gentile or disreputable after four or five years of this work I knew a lot about our people saints and sinners, rich and poor and you get a sense that that human contact with what you're mapping has gone away a bit in the modern era and there's probably both gain and loss by 1937 the sand board company had switched over to aerial surveys for the basis of these maps they were no longer necessarily having people walk these places individually to get dimensions following an advance in military technology again, the military technology the art of aerial photography had gotten much better after World War I people realized that we can actually get really good maps just by flying and taking pictures we didn't necessarily need to lose hundreds of surveyors in the process these cameras it's a fair child camera type very high resolution and meant to basically be flown over any area for survey in a bit of an overlap so if you fly a straight line in one direction for say 50 miles do a bit of a bank and then fly a straight line back for 50 miles you make sure that those two paths that the camera is capturing are slightly overlapped and you're able to do a stereogram that gives you a sense of height so the way that this was done this is no longer ever a step his men trying to cross the Himalayas with a bunch of chains and measurements that does not look like a good position to be working in but it would still be significantly easier than what would have been done even a hundred years prior to this so this gentleman is laying out a series of manual stereograms from aerial photography and this is the area that he's working with on behalf of San Juan is probably I want to say this is probably about the size of the town of Colchester so there would have been some pretty significant detail in each of those photos and he's making sure they're all lined up so that with a stereo viewer on top of these coordinated places you can actually see the terrain pop out and from there it can be used to transfer into photographic maps and to give really precise elevation information and incidentally really precise boundary information based on the things that can be seen so this is a kind of close up example of this as I'm talking about this is still Colchester and you can see that it's Murmock there's forest, farm, fields not a lot in the way of dwellings few roads the dead giveaway of human activity is always in streamlines and you can see those pretty clearly here it's the field boundaries in some cases the roads but for the most part we're looking at a very pastoral landscape and 1937 was the first time that any such survey was captured in Vermont I'm sure in other cases some aerial photos have been captured sort of here and there but this was the first conserved effort and I love this aerial survey so much that I'll come back to it in the course of this talk but I also made an online viewer where you can pan back and forth between the present day and 1937 just because there's always new things to see as far as what's changed but one of the outgrowths of this ready availability of imagery is that a single analyst in a really horrible ergonomic position would still be able to create a parcel map with a fair degree of accuracy without actually having to visit the location so this really increased the accuracy the temporal scale the spatial scale and the ability to make these things really quickly with a minimum of effort this is a real mechanization of ground survey so we're flying planes in 1937 1946 following the Underworld War II some scientists had different ideas about how you might be able to acquire images of the Earth's surface and then continue scaling up that information this is the first image of Earth taken from space and this was a camera strapped to a V2 buzzbomb that the United States had captured at the end of World War II and then they pointed it into the stratosphere and then somehow recovered a frame on the camera that had not broken up on impact but this is the first view we have of the ground from space and there's not much to see here I mean I think you can tell that's a cloud bank but otherwise I have no idea what we're looking at but you can see the lights going off there's so much possibility here so satellite technology advanced really fast again partly going to military endeavors during the Cold War spy satellites were being used left and right the technology was advancing really fast one of my favorite anecdotes of Cold War spy satellites is that prior to the advent of radio transmitted digital images the way that a spy satellite would return pictures to Earth that it had taken was it would be mounted with a certain number of rolls of film it would actually be exposing those rolls of film when a roll is finished it would get dropped in the Earth's atmosphere just fired a little bit of a little bit of push and then a parachute would pop out of the atmosphere and then the CIA had to coordinate an exact path to the plane to catch the parachute and then get that one roll of film that had been captured so that they could get a really grainy image of a Soviet airstrip somewhere so just the amount of effort that went into this was still reflected on how much potential there was in this technology but by 1973 the civilians get to get on the M2 this was the first Landsat this was launched as a joint endeavor between USGS and NASA in 1973 and this was able to take fairly coarse resolution images but freely available images for the public consumption and the sort of thing you get out of that is this which is a few deltas along the coast in Holland you can see there are canals here, there's a city built up over here you get a sense of where the river of sediment is flowing you have a real sense where the agriculture is and what this became incredibly useful for was environmental monitoring of all sorts and this is scientists at this point really had an amazing tool on their hands what what made this particularly useful is that the pixels were 30 meters on a side so the military was fine with that they didn't really care if you couldn't see a tank 30 meters on a side is I don't like the size of this building but the temporal resolution of this was drastically increased so the way that this satellite was flying was sending it over the pole about 16 times a day which meant that you could get a view of anywhere on earth within like a 2 to 3 week window and then 2 to 3 weeks later you could get the same view again 2 to 3 weeks later you could get the same view again cloud cover dependent but that allows you to see change and that's the sort of thing that that scientists have since been leveraging really effectively even a fairly course change like you know monthly or seasonally technology advanced pretty rapidly so that was a government launch satellite although there have been 8 iterations of the land satellite since then and there are currently 2 still orbiting the earth and taking regular images but those are operated by USGS in 2001 the first privately held high resolution satellite was launched and this thing you can see it's still about the same size as the maybe a little bit smaller than the land satellite was back in 1973 so the actual technology that needs to be up there is still very big but man the resolution you can get out of this thing this took I can't even imagine the negotiation with the US military that it took to launch this because now you can see individual things you can see I mean obviously this is the Sydney opera house but you can see people walking those paths you can see the trajectory of boats you can see if you have more of these satellites you can probably see where something was one day versus where it is the next day well actually I'm getting a bit ahead of myself in 2001 this was just an advanced resolution so for a price that was probably a little prohibitive for the general public you could buy a high resolution image of the world and it didn't matter if you were the military by 2014 the higher resolution is still there now the best resolution you can get is about 30 centimeters on a side per pixel so you can't read newspapers yet but you can identify people not by face you can see that something is a person but 2014 a company called Planet Labs released a new concept to increase temporal resolution because these things called cube sets but what these two guys are holding is a satellite and there are about 250 of these in orbit around Earth right now their spatial resolution isn't amazing it's about 5 meters per pixel but what makes these particularly powerful is that they're constantly looking at every part of the Earth at once they call it a constellation so it gives you things like this where over the course of this is probably like two weeks worth of imagery you can watch when was the last one here last one was in February this year so you can watch Lake Champlain freeze over with pretty great detail I need to... sorry just as a point of reference this is the Wenuski Delta there that's Mallets Bay Plattsburg is over there but when the National Weather Service uses imagery to say okay that's it the lake's closed there's not much coarser resolution imagery this sort of thing could actually say well it's actually a tiny little tunnel it's still open but that's a minor cool you can obviously imagine what power there is in the ability to monitor these things over time and these are the sorts of things that are available to us now and images are not just images the way that a machine interprets a map a machine like this phone that got me here today because I had never been to this spot navigation on Google Maps the way that a machine interprets an image is different than the way that we do we can see houses, roads streets the way that a machine would interpret this is oh how what sort of analysis is being done through here those are just pixels I want lines I want trajectories I want trips an algorithm that's going to determine whether or not there's a significant amount of traffic at a cloverleaf intersection consuming in addition to imagery data it's consuming telemetry data from individual phones and aggregating that and being able to say oh traffic has clearly slowed down right here on this particular line that we know to be a road I'm sorry again for demorphizing algorithms I apologize each color is just directional travel so one car no this is this isn't publicly available data but this is the sort of data that is purchasable and is collected by all of the cell phone carriers so they call it they call it anonymized there's no identity information attached to it but that's a very fraught consideration because there are all sorts of ways to de-anonymize geographic data but my point with this is just that the derivatives that we get out of imagery and out of sensors like the sensors in our phone are exploding they're all over the place the way that a algorithm is basically interpreting the landscape is through a series of points and lines if it's a navigation app it's determining where's the next point at which we have to turn and then from there what's the shortest route the information that's now freely available not necessarily for purchase it's also just going completely crazy these days this is a series of 3D building extrusions from open street map which is a program that's similar to Wikipedia it's an open source map of the world anyone can edit it for better and worse but this area in central burlington has really detailed building footprints including heights so a fairly detailed map of the city can be made laying it on freely available detailed aerial imagery for free all of this stuff is just available to the public google is the incumbent in mapping these days which is probably a position that would have surprised even men about 10 years ago but they by advancing google maps as one of their primary business tools have also advanced the technology almost as much as though they were at war the amount of technological advancement absent the conflict here is kind of startling because google purchases imagery from satellites but they also build algorithms to detect buildings and then map them perfectly and include them in a very easy interface for all of us to get access to I don't mean to harp on google too much but they are also doing this entirely behind a walled garden and their data freely available all the money that they're putting into these derivatives is staying with them but for better or worse as I mentioned they're being incumbent they do amazing things with their maps and for those folks who have used google earth this may look familiar this is a display that they bring with them to conferences I've seen it in person in a few mapping conferences but the basic idea here is that you want google earth to be a little more so let's just put it up on a whole bunch of screens give a small control of the front and the power of the world is at your fingertips and it's not just geographic information you can see they've tied it to wikipedia articles there's endless historical, social, cultural information available at your fingertips in I particularly like this interface for its immersion but we have all of the same data available in a phone like this and that's where he's his map that's the one that he claimed would not that he was staking a position but he in that story talked about how people realize geography was useless as soon as it got to a one-to-one scale and it's really anything but that in the current scheme of things but what happens most frequently and I've heard this from some google engineers is when they set this up every person who visits this display the first thing they search for is their house their own address you want to have a sense of where am I in this global context and if it requires flying from just over Japan in a stratosphere down to your house that's an amazing sense of context and it gives you that real geographic center so I personally like to do the same thing and I like to do this through the historical change as well this is the Wienewski River almost to the delta but between Colchester and the Interveil here in Burlington this is 1937, the imagery that I mentioned before and I like this one because it shows that Vermont is pretty resolute, Vermont doesn't change in a lot of ways so this is 2017 still farms, still forests still field and then in other ways this is Mallets Bay a little bit further actually this part of the image was in the previous one we looked at Vermont is a bit more dynamic something that's fascinating about this one is look how much forest has come this was it's really interesting to see the tree cover increase in tandem with the human cover this is 2017 and then before it was 1937 so the 80 year split basically transformed this part of Mallets Bay completely from agricultural landscape to suburban landscape so my point with this though is that I like to center myself this is one of the areas where I first came back to when I returned to Vermont after a long time in particular this is it did an arrow come down here ah there we go so that is a spot that I was born in Vermont, raised in Vermont I went to college in Vermont, left for a time and then came back when my wife got an amazing scholarship that we had for a PhD I was like that's great let's move back to Vermont the first place we came back was a condo that we bought in an old farmhouse in the corner of Goss Court in North Avenue in Burlington and the landscape is a zoom of what we were seeing before in Colchester it's lots of trees but this is a human landscape look at all those straight lines and the way it looked in 1937 was considerably different and the house is still there it was a farmhouse from the late 1800s turned into condos for our benefit you can see there's some institutional thing that's not there now but this landscape is home I'm trying to understand what it looked like in the past and that 1937 series gives me this amazing sense of context in the same way that the map of Philadelphia gives me an amazing socio-economic context for my family and the way the map of vermin gives me an amazing emotional sense of context and that I think is the essence of maps no matter how much power we get no matter how detailed our maps are we still try to center ourselves and I honestly think that's going to be the thing that saves us as mapping technology gets more and more advanced is our ability to contextualize and look for home and everything okay thank you I think I'm running off the elevation of the mountain I think that they still use the same technique they knew a distance to the base and a right angle up and then they shot a laser beam of the apartment and they timed it to see when it came back down and that gave them elevation and they still use that technique that's something 30 years ago interesting timing is not a method I have heard of the time it came up to the valley it seemed false and then they measured the distance yeah okay that makes sense I think that the geodetic stuff that people use now geologists have all sorts of fun toys but I think the stuff that they tend to use are correlations with magnetic readings from space which is a little bit crazy we have magnetic sensing satellites that are checking okay the Earth has actually slightly changed its diameter here but in combination with LiDAR which is like the light version of the radar oh man yeah well some of the things I've shown come from LiDAR so it's a new technique I think I haven't heard of the timed version that's interesting I think all the different measurements are done with the laser send the laser beam and time it coming back to the mini microsecond generally the German distance is probably two and seven perhaps a millimeter yeah the professional surveyors will tell you that the GIS stuff that I learned 20 years ago is useless because it's not precise to the you know to the centimeter but yeah that's interesting that I'm not a surveyor I don't know enough about what they use but I wonder how long that sensible light-paying between locations has been used instead of chains because that was for the longest time that was the the way you had it yeah that's a lost lost part sorry yes so much of a question is a comment I'm an astronomer I notice that all of your maps are in the wrong direction in probably this is a connection with your spy satellite a few years before that spy satellite picture the chair of our department and the director of our observatory we were planning to build a large telescope in west Texas and so he was going around talking to people went to an optical plant where they made large mirrors and stuff like that saw all of the mirrors you know just sort of there he knew what astronomers were planning to build in the way of telescopes and he knew that those were not maybe they were calibrated for looking down instead he figured that they were planning to put those telescopes up into space and point them in the wrong direction as far as astronomers working and so it became clear that these spy satellites although it was very secret at the time it was so secret when I was working on the Hubble telescope project 10 years later we wanted to test the mirror of the Hubble telescope which as you recall came out bad because it's still that's been fixed that's been fixed the mirror figure was wrong it was wrong at the edge it was too flat by about the width of the human hair at the edge and that was enough to make it so the images could not be they were all blurred but the astronomers on the working group that I was a member of we need to test that mirror and we need to test the whole optical system before we put this telescope in order now we knew it was rumored, let's put it that way but there was a test facility that couldn't have done it that the Air Force had but we were not allowed to know about that and therefore we weren't allowed to use it therefore we would have had to expect $2 million to build the test facility ourselves the project said that's too expensive so the project ended up spending an extra $2 billion fixing the problem wow so that's what the secrecy of the five satellite program that's all that it wasn't secret, people knew about it but they were trying to pretend it was secret anyways yeah, well that's one of the like space whether you're looking at Earth or looking outward it seems to me it's generally a good example of how we worked together as humans it's some sort of great communitarian effort but then there's always anecdotes like that there's some form of bureaucracy or some form of secrecy in competitions like sort of shooting it down but that was, is it the new telescope that has some issue with it still? what happened was we figured out the amount of the incorrectness of the curvature of the mirror was and at the time you could send a space shuttle up the shuttle was no longer around you could send a space shuttle up and replace the instrument with another version of the instrument so they replaced the instruments with instruments that had corrected optics that were exactly correct for the bad mirror so all of the stuff that's come out since 1993 which was three years after the telescope was launched have all been with the corrected optics and that's why we have these wonderful pictures from Hubble Telescope today they're so sharp and wonderful those are amazing to see and thank you for your work on that we all benefit, it's great to see you yeah I'm curious about and when we started using this we could really explore or use anything like that may I want to repeat your question yeah certainly the question is when handheld compasses were first put into use and unfortunately I don't have a solid answer for that, there is a solid answer and I will probably google it later the best that I know is that early probably 11th century they started being able to use directional implementations of some kind which is one of the reasons that the Danes and the Norwegians were so successful in making it from Europe to Iceland to Greenland to New Zealand I don't know exactly when the magnetic compass that we know today came into being but it's certainly been around for at least 200 years because I know that it's been a major pool of navigation since then sorry I forgot to answer then I'll be back I'm writing again the adult biography of James Wilson who created the first American globe in the 18th century and Bradford he never saw any of the world except Hanover and New England he walked down there to learn how to integrate the globe but I'm finding as I work on it that how political the globes were his first globe came out in 1810 and the Upper West was suit country and charity and stuff like that but when the next round of globes came out in 1810 those are completely erased politically done away with the Indian problem and I find that really interesting that Wilson Park walked across the country sort of owned it and from then on the US owned it and the Native American tribes do not braille but he did his whole globes and they're in the Smithsonian now and they're at Yale and Princeton and Norwich was the closest one to here I'm reading the 1790 edition of the prequity of the Hanover he didn't see any of these places he just did you say Bradford Wilson? James Wilson, alright I gotta look him up that's a wait for the book which will be easy to read for you I don't know words on it maybe I have time for a couple more questions sorry there was one well I just wanted to thank you for making it so personal your personal history I was born in 1937 really? oh you're the person that centers the map that's great and we had an FHA mortgage really? the farm that I grew up on in Watesfield there was somebody came through with an airplane taking pictures of all the farms and selling them to people so I had a wonderful area of our farm in 1950 and these things just are so personal and then I'm thinking when my daughter moved somewhere and all I had was a street address I went on Google or somewhere I don't even know what it was and I could find the building on the street in Florida where she lived was it street view like a picture of the front door building oh yeah and the street and the whole neighborhood and you could pull it out and get a big view and down and get something did that help like feel a little bit closer? yeah I just feel like you know where she lived yeah things have advanced yeah thank you so much I was wrapped