Newly digitized maps in our collections portal

The striking bird’s eye view that appears in the header of this week’s newsletter is taken from a 1903 map of the freight terminals which were redeveloped nearly a century later into the Seaport neighborhood. It’s just one of hundreds of newly digitized items that we added to our ever-growing Digital Collections portal this week. Do you have 10 minutes (or maybe 10 hours) to spare? Take a browse through the newly added collections and see what strikes your creativity and curiosity. From a pictorial map of the U.S. food industry created by the Armour meatpacking company to an 1874 chart of Long Island Sound that’s more than 8 feet long, our digital resources offer a treasure trove of interesting material.

Browse newly added items → 

In Person: Indigenous Land Rights & Environmental Justice · Aug 1, 6pm ET

Join us for a conversation with scholar and educator Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes descendant) on Indigenous land rights, environmental justice, and resilience. The event will feature maps from our collections and will highlight excerpts from recent documentary films as part of the Continued Conversations series in our current exhibition, More or Less in Common. The talk is free and open to the public and will be held in-person at the Central Library in Copley Square.

Register for free → 

A welcome to Ezra Acevedo, our new Northeastern co-op

At the beginning of July, our staff grew once again as Ezra Acevedo, a rising senior at Northeastern University, started their co-op term with the Map Center in the role of Visitor Services & Exhbition Assistant. Ezra will be helping to staff our gallery at the Central Library, offering tours and interpretation to members of the public and helping us develop our exhibition programs. Can you guess what Ezra particularly likes about this 1904 map of Massachusetts libraries?

Read the interview → 

In-Person Author Talk: Alexandra Lange · Aug 4, 4pm ET

Join us to hear architectural historian and design critic Alexandra Lange on the history of public space in America as seen through shopping malls, the subject of her new book Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. Lange will be in conversation with Sara Jensen Carr of Northeastern University. The talk is free and open to the public and will be held in-person at the Central Library in Copley Square.

Register for free → 

Want to try your hand at remixing the floor map in our gallery?

Have you wondered what goes in to making an original map for a Map Center exhibition? Emily Bowe wrote about the process of making a large floor map for the current exhibition entitled “A City of Unequal Risks” that displays data collected as part of the 2016 Climate Ready Boston report. As staff engages with visitors and students in the gallery, we love hearing what feedback they have on what they might add or change about the map if they were the mapmaker. We can’t change the map on the floor, so we built a tool that allows you to play mapmaker and tweak the existing map in this interactive.

Remix the map → 

Planning a university course in Fall 2022? Add a map visit to your syllabus!

Are you teaching at the university level on topics related to geography, history, cities, environment, visual methods, or digital studies? Can you imagine your students seeing the world through the perspective of a geographer? The fall semester is just around the corner and we’re ready to start booking in-person and virtual workshops. No matter what discipline you teach, we’re always excited to engage with students and their work, whether in the form of a gallery tour, a special collections showing, or a workshop about geographic methods.

Book a visit →