Routes Ahead of Us In-Person Event: Thompson and Ramos

Our Spring 2024 conversation series Routes Ahead of Us kicks off this month! In this first program, Stacy Thompson, Executive Director of LivableStreets, and Reggie Ramos, Executive Director of Transportation for Massachusetts, will discuss contemporary social and political forces shaping transportation policy in Greater Boston. Throughout the remainder of the series, we’ll take the themes of our current exhibition Getting Around Town and consider the history of Boston’s transit system with questions about how to build a better, more equitable urban mobility system in the future.

Register for Free → 

TransitMatters Virtual Webinar: Transportation Advocacy and the Data Dashboard

Join us for a virtual event with TransitMatters on February 21 7-8 pm ET, as they discuss their award-winning Data Dashboard tool, and the impact that open data has had on transportation advocacy nationwide. Since its founding, TransitMatters has focused on helping Greater Boston advocate for the safe, frequent, and reliable transit. The TransitMatters Labs Team drives transportation advocacy by building tools with MBTA data to engage the public and increase transparency. The Data Dashboard has played a prominent role in increasing awareness about slow zones throughout the MBTA network. Join the webinar to learn more about how this tool was built and discuss future possibilities for civic data design.

Register for Free → 

Mapping Black Cambridge: 1790-1820

Supported by the Leventhal Center’s Small Grants for Early Career Digital Publications, Joan Brunetta and Eve Loftus made use of early Census data to document and located Black Cantabrigians in the years 1790–1820. At this time, census takers recorded only scant information, and the majority of people of color were known only as tally marks in the “all other free persons” data column.

By conducting careful research, Brunetta and Loftus were able to find 66 unique Cambridge households with at least one Black resident and created an interactive map showing 35 locations where they could identify residents’ locations in the city.

Read the Full Article → 

Teachers: Join us for a 2024 Summer Institute!

This summer we will welcome 25 educators in grades 3-12 to Portland, Maine, and Boston, Massachusetts, from July 14 to July 26, 2024 for the NEH Summer Institute “Teaching With Maps: Community and Resilience in Maritime New England,” in partnership with the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education. During the two-week program, teachers will explore how maps and landscapes reflect, erase, obscure, and celebrate Black and Indigenous geographies and histories along New England’s maritime coast. All participants will receive a $2,200 stipend for completing the NEH Summer Institute. Applications close on March 5.

Learn More and Apply → 

Featured Visitor Maps from Getting Around Town

If you’ve made an in-person visit to Getting Around Town, you may have seen our invitation to make your own maps of Boston or other parts of the world. We’ve gotten to see how creative and detailed our patrons have been and we’d like to show off some of our staff favorite maps from the exhibition!

A staff member will feature their favorite maps in every newsletter going forward through to the end of the exhibition. Check back on social media or in future newsletters to see if your map made it to our feature!

These featured maps were chosen by Lauren Chen, our Reference and Cataloging Librarian.

Visit the Gallery to Make Your Own →