When Maps Go Digital
Posted by Penny in ArticlesI arrived at college in 1984 with my electric typewriter and a bit of BASIC learned in high school. I was a geography major, and learned to make maps in a cartography lab with vellum, ink, light tables, X-acto knives, and rub-on letters. I stopped using the electric typewriter within a year or two. Mapmaking was also changing rapidly. While making this gallery, I found a great pair of photos on the Commons to capture the moment of change:
 Eunice ‘Biki’ Wilson, 1984 |
 Geography Department, 1986 |
These photos were taken at the London School of Economics, two years apart. The photo on the left, taken in 1984, shows a cartographer in the Geography Department, Eunice Wilson, working on a map of Great Britain. She’s holding a pen, and two rotary phones are visible nearby. The photo on the right is taken in 1986, also in the Geography Department, but here the woman working on a map of France is using a handheld device (maybe a scanner), and a single-drive Macintosh computer is nearby. Another computer is behind her.
Are both women using the same model desk lamp? Maybe; some designs are classic.
September 16th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
The woman on the right looks like she is using a flat bed digitiser. (the link is broken so I can’t see a larger image to be sure). It is a mouse like device which you place over the feature you want to digitise and then you click the button at each vertex to send the information to the computer. The table bit has some clever electronics in it to track where the sensor is when the button is pressed.
It was slow, hard and boring work but pretty much the only way to convert paper maps in to digital data to use in a GIS.
September 16th, 2010 at 6:57 pm
Here’s a direct link, Ian! http://www.flickr.com/photos/lselibrary/3989341187/
September 21st, 2010 at 1:35 am
[...] Cartographers were still using pen and paper in the 1980s, Penny reports. “I arrived at college in 1984 with my electric typewriter and a bit of BASIC learned in high school. I was a geography major, and learned to make maps in a cartography lab with vellum, ink, light tables, X-acto knives, and rub-on letters.” The above photo, of LSE Geography Department cartographer Eunice Wilson, was taken in 1984. Another photo from the LSE , also featured in Penny’s curated Flickr gallery of women and maps, shows computer-based cartography only two years later. Via Cartographie. [...]
July 25th, 2011 at 11:28 pm
[...] moment Two years in time: I was fascinated by [this post] at the indicommons blog showing how cartography changed in a two-year span in the 1980s. [...]