Ashley Baynton-Williams
Presentation Title: Map Collecting for Beginners: An Informal Workshop
Saturday, 11 am
Biography
Ashley Baynton-Williams is the third generation of his family to work as a map-dealer, learning the trade first in the family and then with Jonathan Potter. He works principally with a small number of clients – institutional and private – focused on building world class collections. For nearly twenty years he has been principal trade adviser to the MacLean Collection in the Chicago region, one of the great private map collections in the world.
Ashley is also a noted scholar and researcher; his best known work, released to universal critical acclaim, is “British Map Engravers a Dictionary of Engravers lithographers and their principal employers to 1850”, co-authored with Laurence Worms; the two are now far-advanced in the companion volume of “American Map Engravers a Dictionary of Engravers Lithographers and their principal employers to 1839”; more recently he wrote “The Curious Map Book” for the British Library, but he has numerous other books and articles to his name.
Description:
A passionate advocate of the future of the map trade, Ashley has been giving his introductory talk for new collectors at the London Map Fair for many years and also at the Chicago Map Fair. It is an informal presentation for collectors wanting to start a collection, to give them confidence in making the first steps, during which each attendee will be able to handle genuine old maps and ask questions of one of the world’s leading experts.
Dr. Jerry Brotton
Presentation Title: Talking Maps at the Bodleian Library
Saturday, 3 pm
Biography
Dr. Jerry Brotton is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (1997). Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (2000), co-authored with Lisa Jardine, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (2002), and The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and his Art Collection (2006). His bestselling and prize-winning A History of the World in Twelve Maps, (2012) has been published in twelve languages. In 2014 he published Great Maps (Dorling Kindersley). He is also a broadcaster, and presented BBC4’s three-part TV series, ‘Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession’ (2010), ‘Mapping Ulster’ (2013) and BBC Radio 3’s ‘Courting the East’ (2007). His latest book is This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (Penguin, 2016).
Description:
Professor Jerry Brotton, the curator of a forthcoming Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, map exhibition, will showcase key maps and the stories they tell. His presentation will include in-depth analysis of medieval Islamic maps, especially those of Idrisi, and unveil a new 3D map of the world without water.
Dr. William J. Pestle
Presentation Title: Antillean Vision: Imagining a Map of the Prehistoric Caribbean
Sunday, 1 pm
Biography:
Dr. William J. Pestle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Miami and the director of UM’s Latin American Studies Program. He is an archaeologist who specializes in the study of the ancient peoples of the Caribbean, particularly Puerto Rico. His academic background includes a B.A. from the University of Michigan, a M.Sc. from the University of Bradford (UK), and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research efforts have been supported by the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. In 2018, he curated Antillean Visions: Maps and the Making of the Caribbean at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami.
Description:
Every human society, regardless of technology or literacy, possesses geo-spatial knowledge of the world around them. While no prehistoric maps of the Antilles have survived to the present day, we have no reason to suspect that the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean were any different. Indeed, all available evidence indicates that the region’s people had a detailed and expansive knowledge of the islands and waters that made up their world. Here, as based on ethno-historic accounts, archaeological evidence, ethnographic analogy, genetic findings, and social network analysis, we explore how the prehistoric societies of the insular Caribbean may have conceived of their world and speculate as to how a “map” of the era may have appeared.
Matthew Toro
Presentation Title: It’s All Data After All: Cartographic Frontiers in the Geospatial Revolution
Sunday, 3 pm
Biography:
Matthew is a research geographer currently serving as the Director of Maps, Imagery, and Geospatial Services at the Arizona State University Library. In this capacity, he leads programmatic, technology, collections, and research initiatives at the library’s Map and Geospatial Hub. Matt has researched and co-authored publications on subjects as diverse as land-change conflicts in the rural landscapes of southern Laos to the relationships of the built environment and community health in the urban landscapes of greater Miami. In 2014 he founded Miami Geographic, an urban geography data visualization blog. Among other projects, he is currently constructing a cartographic history of the greater Grand Canyon region, and is overseeing the historic Mapping Grand Canyon Conference in late February 2019.
Description:
The 20th century marked the beginning of an on-going transformation in the way humans collect, communicate, consume, and internalize information related to geographic space. Advances in computing, global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), remote sensing, and geographic information systems (GIS), among others, have created not only an era of so-called ‘big data’ but an era of ‘big geo-data’ too. The term ‘geospatial revolution’ strives to encompass the complex range of reciprocal societal transformations resulting from these technological changes. Indeed, we are living through a geospatial revolution. In this increasingly digital world, characterized by growing techno-fetishism, one might be inclined to overlook or undervalue the more traditional world of cartography. Through demonstrations of geospatial image processing workflows applied to historic paper maps, this presentation illustrates the opposite: old maps are data too. And, when viewed as such, the possibilities for geographic knowledge production become endless.
