Our Meeting Place
Our meetings are now held at the Mid-Manhattan Library, 455 Fifth Avenue at 40th Street, in their sixth-floor Conference Room. The Library is diagonally across the street (and about 500 feet) from our former meeting place—see photo below if you need directions.
With the exception of field trips and special events, our regular meetings are on the second Saturday of each month (except June, August and December). Our meetings are open to the public, and there is no charge to attend.
Show Mid-Manhattan Library location.
See our Newsletter for other map-related events in the New York City area that may be of interest to members. Contact the sponsoring organization for further details about these events.
NOTE: The New York Public Library provides meeting space to the New York Map Society, but the Society receives no financial support nor sponsorship from the Library. Likewise, the New York Map Society and the Mercator Society are entirely separate organizations, with no financial or other business ties between them. The New York Map Society is financially supported solely by dues paid by its members, and no elected officer is employed by the Library.
Our Next Meeting
Saturday, September 7 at 2:30 pm
6th Floor Conference Room, Mid-Manhattan Library
Making an impact: Telling stories with Google Maps and Google Earth
Google Maps and Google Earth are great tools to help you explore the world, whether it’s walking along the Grand Canyon using Street View, flying over Vatican City with Earth’s 3D imagery, or navigating around Japan’s Haneda Airport using indoor maps. Yet these tools also provide a powerful platform for story-telling, visualizing, and making sense of data. Google’s Media Program Manager Vanessa Schneider will look at how people across industries—from non-profits to academia to media—are using maps to make an impact, including the Surui people in Brazil tracking deforestation, Google Crisis Response making emergency information accessible during Hurricane Sandy, and a professor in British Columbia using maps to stop school closures. We’ll also talk about how you can start telling your own stories with Google’s mapping tools.
Based in Mountain View, California, Ms. Schneider's been with Google for more than two years, working on outreach for Google Maps. A member of the Google Earth Outreach team, her most recent project at Google is helping journalists tell stories with maps. Before becoming a Googler, Vanessa worked at The New York Times for several years as a community specialist, Time Inc. as a researcher and reporter, and at New York startup Hot Potato, acquired by Facebook in summer 2010.
Future Meetings
We're working on our Fall, 2013 program schedule, and the preliminary details which follow will be updated as more information becomes available.
Saturday, October 12, 2013 at 2:30 pm
Graham Arader Galleries
Field Trip
(details to follow)
Tuesday, October 22 at (evening—time and place to be announced) pm
Seeing the World Anew: the Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 and 1516 World Maps
Members-Only Meeting: John Hessler will give an overview of the history of the Schöner Sammelband, the portfolio that contained the 1507 and 1516 world maps, and perhaps the most important collection of cartographic materials to survive from the early 16th century. Hessler will speculate on the use and reception of Waldseemüller's maps by their original owner, the Nuremburg mathematician and globemaker Johannes Schöner, and discuss them in the context of late medieval and early Renaissance scientific practice. He will also discuss other astronomical and cartographic materials found with the maps in the Wolfegg Castle, including Schöner’s celestial and terrestrial globe gores, fragments, and a star chart of the southern hemisphere by Albrecht Dürer.
Chet Van Duzer will examine the cartographic sources of Waldseemüller’s maps, that the 1507 map was largely based on a 1491 world map by Henricus Martellus, while the 1516 Carta Marina took its outlines from a ca. 1504 nautical chart by Nicolò de Caverio. He will show that the Carta Marina is the result of Waldseemüller’s radical re-evaluation of what a world map should be.
John W. Hessler is Curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection for the History of the Early Americas at the Library of Congress and a Lecturer in the History of Early Modern Science in the School for Advanced Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He has written extensively on the history of mathematics, science and cartography and is the author of The Naming of America: Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 World Map and the Cosmographiae Introductio, Thoreau on Cape Cod: His Journeys and His Lost Maps, Seeing the World Anew: the Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 and 1516 World Maps (with Chet Van Duzer), and A Renaissance Globemaker's Toolbox: Johannes Schöner and the Revolution of Modern Science, 1475-1550. He is currently at work on two books on Galileo, The Sidereus Nuncius, Venice, 1610 (edited with Dan De Simone, forthcoming Fall, 2012) and Galileo's Logic: Aristotle and the Question of Mathematical Certainty in the Early 17th Century (2013).
Chet Van Duzer recently completed a Kislak Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress, where he studied Martin Waldseemüller’s Carta Marina of 1516, and is currently an Invited Research Scholar at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. He has published extensively on medieval and Renaissance maps in journals such as Imago Mundi, Terrae Incognitae and Word & Image. He is also the author of Johann Schöner’s Globe of 1515: Transcription and Study, published by the American Philosophical Society in 2010, the first detailed analysis of one of the earliest surviving terrestrial globes that includes the New World. His book Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps will be published by the British Library in 2013.
Saturday, November 9 at 2:30 pm
6th Floor Conference Room, Mid-Manhattan Library
The Elusive Nile: Explorers and the Changing Map of Africa
(details to follow)
2014 Meetings
Saturday, April 12 at 2:30 pm
6th Floor Conference Room, Mid-Manhattan Library
The Itinerario Maps of Jan Huygens van Linschoten
Our guest speaker is Frederik Muller, owner of Frederik Muller Rare Books and Maps in Bergum, Netherlands (more details to follow)
Our Last Meeting
Saturday, May 11, 2013 at 2:30 pm
6th Floor Conference Room, Mid-Manhattan Library
The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr.
John Randel Jr. was the eccentric and flamboyant surveyor who laid the 1811 grid plan on Manhattan Island. Marguerite Holloway will talk about the challenges Randel faced measuring, gridding and mapping the hilly, rural island and about his cartographic legacy. Randel created stunning maps of Manhattan, and his fanatically precise surveys gave rise to data that researchers still use today.
Marguerite Holloway teaches at Columbia University, where she is the director of science and environmental journalism. She has written for many publications, including Scientific American, the New York Times and Discover. Her book,The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor ( New York: WW Norton & Co., 2013), will be available for sale at the lecture.