Jeremy Crampton

Stanford University is nearing completion of a great new resource: putting their collection of OSS maps online. It’s not definitively known how many maps were made by the OSS Map Division (headed by Arthur Robinson), but she cites an estimate of at least 5,752. During a recent AMA, I asked Marcy Bidney, Curator at the American Geographical Map Library, how many maps were in their collection: It would be great if AGSL were to link through to the Stanford project on their own digital collection site. NARA states that it has about 7,500 OSS maps (p.24 of this document), but an item-level listing has not yet been made public, although I understand the number Julie quotes above (5,752) is based on such a list by a map librarian colleague.

An interesting if rather crude animated map sequence I’ve made of the position of the European Front during world War II, from August 7 1944, to May 15 1945. This was made from 41 separate maps in the archives of the American Geographical Society Library (AGSL). Formerly classified RESTRICTED, these maps were made by the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, elements of which were later transferred to the Department of State and became the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), although many members returned to their academic posts following the war.

Bill Bunge’s Nuclear War Atlas was published in two formats, a book from Basil Blackwell published in 1988, and a poster published in June 1982, with 28 maps on one side, and extensive text on the other, just one week too late for the great United Nations demonstration in New York City. The first edition of the atlas was designed for field use among the unemployed of Detroit’s black slum ghetto (who hold my loyalty but who were vulnerable to the false slogan ‘war means work’ when today it clearly means death), but my work proved far too technical. The original edition was in the tradition of Lobeck’s Physiographic Diagram of North America, with 20,000 words of text on one side and 28 maps on the other, suitable for poster display upon completion of reading it. Selling the atlas was an excuse to talk peace during the summers of 1982 and 1983, talking to thousands of people door-to-door, often at great length, especially in Toronto, retaught me Detroit’s lesson that people needed, as as a dire warning, hope and a more articulated plan for saving the children.

Complementing the RGS-IBG’s conference theme (Geographical landscapes/changing landscapes of geography), these workshops invite participants to investigate the effects of machine vision on a variety of phenomena: the form of urban life, the experience of driving, the dynamics of war, and the nature of gaming. The workshops aim to provisionally address a number of questions regarding machine vision, and its effect on the ability to ‘navigate’ (literally, metaphorically, conceptually, methodologically) new data landscapes. The sessions are: Session 1: A screening and discussion of Liam Young’s film Renderlands (2017), which follows a group of local animators through the office environments where they work, the digital landscapes they produce, and the cities in which they live. Session 3: A dive into the sometime murky waters of YouTube to explore, analyze, create and refine ‘terrain typologies’ present in autonomous vehicle videos If you have any questions or requests