NACIS 2022

Early Electric Orientation Maps: A Technological Opportunity for Invention to Eclipse Obviousness
Mark Monmonier, Syracuse University
In the second decade of the twentieth century electricity emerged as a general-purpose technology that inspired widespread innovation in areas as diverse as lighting, manufacturing, transportation, household appliances, and cartography. Six US patents for an electrical orientation map reveal a progressive elaboration of earlier work, with patent examiners filtering out non-original claims. All six patentees worked in settings that confirmed or conferred knowledge of electric circuits and cartographic applications, and they no doubt saw a favorable vetting as an accolade of achievement if not a promise of profit. Even so, only August Merk-Wirz’s pioneering 1915 patent seems to have been developed commercially, and then only in Great Britain.

Oh So Secret.  Women Mapmakers of the OSS
Judith Tyner, California State University, Long Beach
When one reads about women in the OSS, spies are what come to mind., But another group played an equally important role in helping win World War II. These were the mapmakers of the OSS who worked under the guidance of Arthur Robinson. There was little glamor in creating maps with pen and ink and relief maps of plaster, but they produced thousands of maps used by Roosevelt and Churchill and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I look at the role of women mapmakers in the OSS and focus on one woman as an exemplar.

Artefacts of a Discipline at Work: Tracing the Geographer's Influence Through the "Cartographic Records of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace"
Cy Abbott, University of Oregon
At the 1919-1920 Paris Peace Conference that concluded WWI, American cartographers and geographers were called upon to actively contribute mapping that was employed to influence policy decisions around border delineation. Specifically, the Greco-Turkish border became uniquely influenced by American academic geographers’ involvement in the peace process. The preserved archival records of these experts shed light not only on this pivotal moment in both Greece and Turkey's national identities, but also a similarly pivotal moment in the development of the discipline of geography in America. This historical cartographic research draws attention to the early 'scientificisation' of cartography that occurred at this time.

The Mapping of North American native languages in the 19th century
John Cloud, Smithsonian
A great enterprise in mapping Native American languages and the areas where they were spoken developed in the 19th century, even as those same Native Americans were under assault, sometimes by the same agencies mapping them. The three key developments: modern linguistics, evolved from philology, with new perceptions of language families and their evolution and the invisible rules of syntax the invention of phonetic systems capable of describing non-western languages and the invention of lithography, and more especially chromo-lithography, which augmented the cartographic evocation of subtle patterns of spatial distribution not readily characterized by "boundaries". All this converged to create masterpieces of 19th century cartography.

Slack channel: #nacis2022-frost