On Friday, April 8, 2016 at noon in the Population Studies and Training Center in Mencoff Hall, Bill Rankin, Assistant Professor of the History of Science at Yale University, will give a talk, “The Map, the Grid, and the Politics of Space, 1915 – 2015.”
This event is part of the Spatial Humanities Lecture Series and is sponsored by Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4), the Brown University Library, and the M. B. Mandeville Lectureship Fund. It is free and open to the public.
In the last hundred years, the authority of the representational map has been challenged from multiple directions. On the level of everyday spatial management, the god’s-eye view of the map has been supplemented and displaced by new kinds of coordinate systems that stitch together the urban and the territorial. On the level of spatial imagination, the one-size-fits-all topographic map has been upstaged by new forms of argumentative and activist cartography. This talk addresses both of these turns–the first historically, during World War I and the decades afterward; the second through Rankin’s own urban mapping work.
Bill Rankin‘s research focuses on the relationship between science and space, from the territorial scale of states and globalization down to the scale of individual buildings. He is particularly interested in mapping, the environmental sciences and technology, architecture and urbanism, and methodological problems of digital scholarship, spatial history, and geographic analysis (including GIS). His forthcoming book, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century, is a history of the mapping sciences in the twentieth century. His work in cartography can be found at www.radicalcartography.net.
Date: Friday, April 8, 2016
Time: 12 p.m.
Location: Population Studies and Training Center, Mencoff Hall, 68 Waterman Street, Providence