Through technology, Stanford’s David Rumsey Map Center unlocks the storytelling power of spatial data
Maps printed on paper may seem quaint in this age of GPS and Google Earth, but David Rumsey, a collector, author, entrepreneur and devotee of maps old and new, sees no dichotomy.
“To me it’s all a continuum,” Rumsey told PBS NewsHour: one that starts with hand-drawn maps on paper and moves through printing to digitization and crowdsourcing.
His gifts to Stanford and his expansive and collaborative vision shape the new David Rumsey Map Center that opened in April 2016 in the university’s Green Library.
The center houses more than 150,000 maps and 60,000 digital files. Giant computer screens allow georeferenced maps centuries apart in age to be layered or displayed side by side, revealing how the world and our ways of depicting it have changed. A 6-foot touchscreen drafting table fosters new creations.
“The vision that I’ve held for the center is that it will be this amazing place to enjoy the maps as exhibits, to work with the maps as research, to come to a lecture, to have a class about mapping,” Rumsey said in this 2015 video.
He began the task of making his collection digitally accessible in the 1990s.
“The Stanford faculty is very geospatially oriented, and that was thrilling to us, the idea that this collection would be used not just by our normal beloved map lovers and cartographic historians but by Americanists, by linguists, by environmental historians,” he said.
Stanford students began to use the center even before its formal opening. Barbara Mackraz incorporated its resources into her spring 2016 Master of Liberal Arts thesis on changing visions of the Nile. Mackraz superimposed Google Earth images onto centuries of maps to reveal how cartographers’ renditions of the river were shaped by classical and European notions of race, culture and geography.
In this video, David Rumsey, Abby Smith Rumsey and library staff share their vision for the new Rumsey Map Center.