This talk by co-curators Ian Spangler, Assistant Curator of Digital and Participatory Geography, and Emily Bowe, Assistant Director, provides a curator’s overview of the latest exhibition from the Leventhal Map & Education Center, Processing Place: How Computers and Cartographers Redrew Our World.

This exhibition explores the rise of computer cartography and early geographic information systems by way of physical maps created with digital software. Processing Place 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.