Dr. Christina Gessler (2:04)

Hello everyone and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I'm pleased to be joined by James Cheshire, who is the author of the Library of Lost Maps, an archive of a world in progress. Welcome to the show, Professor Cheshire.

Professor James Cheshire (2:27)

Thanks for having me.

Dr. Christina Gessler (2:28)

I am so Glad that you're here and that we're going to talk about your book together. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?

Professor James Cheshire (2:36)

Yes. So I'm a professor in Geographic Information and Cartography at University College London, and I'm also the director of something called the Social Data Institute, also based at ucl. So actually I have quite a kind of broad range of interests that kind of situate themselves around geography and mapping, both in terms of contemporary data and maps. So stuff that's happening today. But also now, thanks to working on the book, I'm now kind of interested in some historical archival maps as well.

Dr. Christina Gessler (3:22)

At the Academic life, we're curious about how people found their way through higher ed and if where they are now is something that they always knew they would do. Can you share a bit about that with us, please?

Professor James Cheshire (3:35)

Yeah, I'd be happy to, sort of. I'm someone that never imagine myself as being an academic. I guess I was never someone at school who felt particularly intellectual or academic, and neither of my parents went to university or anything like that, so it was never something that I'd always imagined I would be. But I did my undergraduate at the University of Southampton, which is on the south coast of England, and I kind of enjoyed my studies a lot. I studied physical geography there, which isn't so much of a sort of. In the us, I guess it would be closer to geology or something like that. Geography is kind of an interesting subject in the UK and that we have physical and human geography. But then I kind of developed an interest in mapping and map making and I did really enjoy university. So I then went straight on into a PhD program at UCL, which is where I still am. And it was in that PhD program that I kind of started working with big data sets related to population data, social sciences more than physical sciences, and I kind of built my career out from there. So I got a lectureship after my PhD and then moved into. And that was in a slightly different department to the one I'm in now. And then I moved into the geography department, maybe in 2013, and I've never left.

Dr. Christina Gessler (5:25)

And despite how long you were there, you ended up stumbling on a room in the basement and finding a very surprising map library. Before we come upon your amazing discovery, can you talk to us about what map libraries are and why they seem to be in danger?

Professor James Cheshire (5:43)

Yeah. So every kind of geography department, but also geology departments, landscape architecture, urban planning, all these disciplines that depend and depended on maps would have had a map library or a map cupboard at some point to store all the physical paper maps that they needed and that they would go back and, you know, refer to either in their. Either in research or general interest or study. And of course, what that meant was, you know, they were quite a common site across university campuses in the uk, but also in North America, too, and across Europe. And so essentially, when you have paper maps, you need somewhere to store them and people need to go and visit and use them. With digital mapping that has become redundant as a technology, paper's no longer important for that because, of course, digital maps and digital data much more easily available, and we can get stuff on our phones which is way more up to date and useful than you might find on a paper map. So over the last couple of decades, you know, these. These rooms stopped being used and many became repurposed. The maps were given away, thrown away, put into other library collections, that kind of thing. And so that's a really common story. Places that always had a map library then have lost theirs. The one in ucl, kind of just through sort of twists of fate, I guess, it survived. And the maps themselves haven't disappeared, and the room is largely untouched. And so I think of it a bit like a parent's attic, really. You kind of know it's there, but. But you never really go into it and dig through the contents. So that's what I decided to do about three and a half, four years ago, because there was the threat that the room itself would disappear as the department went through a kind of a relocation process.

Dr. Christina Gessler (8:14)

And you take us into that right away in chapter one, which is called welcome to the Map Library. And there we see you bringing your students in, and they are having a number of different reactions to seeing these physical maps, including emotional ones. People asking if you had to get political permission to share some of these maps with them. Your school in particular draws students from all over the world, and so their worldviews on maps and boundaries are going to differ, and their feelings about where boundaries should be on a map are going to differ. And some of that was just very vividly coming through as you were describing, bringing them there and then many of them, for the first time, engaging with physical maps. Can you say more about that?

Professor James Cheshire (9:06)

Yeah. So I think one of the things that has happened as maps have become digital is we lose a sense of the information that we're being given and how that might change depending on where we are in the world. So if you open a Google map in, say, the USA now, it will say kind of Gulf of America, brackets, Gulf of Mexico. Whereas if you do the same thing here in the uk, it will just say Gulf of Mexico. And so that's one kind of state level intervention that can enable maps to look differently. But actually, even as you look at a Google map on your phone, the labels that are placed there and things like that will differ from one person to the next based on places they've visited before and all that kind of thing. And so you're getting kind of a curated window into the world that will sit kind of with you and you alone. Whereas in the map library, because they're all printed maps, everyone is seeing the same thing at the same time. And so when I put them out in front of students, it may be that the maps we have show disputed regions of the world that in their home countries wouldn't otherwise be shown as such. So if you're from India, the borders of northern India are shown in a very clear way, which would be different to if you were looking them in neighboring countries like China or Pakistan or Bangladesh or something like that. Whereas in the UK we can kind of access all these things, in some other countries you can't. And so I think what's interesting from the, the discussions that I have with students is how comfortable and even uncomfortable they sometimes feel about kind of handling these maps because they are showing things that are potentially quite controversial. But it's quite a nice thing to do as well, because actually the students themselves may be from different parts of the world, that having kind of disputed regions and things like that, students kind of talk it through. And I think that that's one of the nice things about having the physical map in front of you. It enables you to kind of gather around it and discuss what the issues are and indeed understand that it's very hard to make a kind of a perfect definitive map of the world that everyone agrees with.

Dr. Christina Gessler (12:02)

And one of your examples of that, that people may understand even if they haven't seen the types of physical maps that you're talking about, is a map that was used in the Barbie movie and it was meant to be of a made up world with dolls as the main characters. And yet this map sparked a controversy. Can you take us into that and explain why some of the markings on it had great meaning to people in different parts of the world that may have escaped the notice of viewers in other parts of the world?

Professor James Cheshire (12:36)

Yeah, so this is a really kind of fantastic example of the power of maps and the idea that if you take something and you call it a map, then people view it in A very different way to say if you took the same thing and said, this is a sketch or this is a photograph or something like that. So in the case of the Barbie movie, there's a scene where Barbie is. Or one of the Barbies is showing a world map, and it's called a world map because I think that's what the title is on the frame in the film, and it's on this kind of blackboard. And of course, it's a fictional universe. And so the map itself doesn't look like anything you might recognize as a map of the continents, but one of the kind of shapes on the map was kind of labeled as Asia, and off it were these kind of eight kind of dashes. And that was seen by many to evoke this thing called the nine dash line, which is a region of disputed territory in the South China Sea. And all maps in China have this nine dash line on it, which encompasses some islands which are in dispute with the neighboring countries. And so in order to. And so to therefore suggest that the Barbie movie, or the producers of the Barbie film, they were kind of endorsing the Chinese perspective on the world map and endorsing China's territorial claims in these disputed waters that then upset kind of many of the neighboring countries, causing them to either kind of cancel the movie or blur out the map as a form of kind of censoring that image. And this happens all the time. You know, even if you're trying to publish a book like mine, in order for it to be published, or indeed even printed somewhere like China, you would still have to conform. The maps themselves would still have to conform to the Chinese view of where the borders should be drawn, even if the maps themselves are historic. And so that's a kind of a really interesting tension that has to be negotiated, particularly if you're trying to produce maps that are printed and that are distributed globally.

Dr. Christina Gessler (15:26)

The book is full of maps. They're reproduced here in color. And there's also a website that listeners can go to to see some of the maps that we're talking about today. It's the libraryoflostmaps.com Chapter two is called a Room Full of Stories. And you take us even more into what the findings are. We see you climbing on step ladders to take great heavy piles of maps from over your head and try to get them onto the table without dropping them on the floor. As someone who spent a great deal of time in archives for me was pins and needles reading that section. And the book begins to show us how Maps are not just maps. It really depends on who wrote it, who it was for, how we read it, and the various purposes that a map can be used for. In this chapter, we learn that even though a map might be written for a particular purpose, it can be used for a very, very different purpose. Can you take us into the room full of stories?

Professor James Cheshire (16:33)

Yeah. So I suppose that chapter's about, you know, my sense of discovery. I think, as you say, kind of going through all these draws and understanding, you know, that one of the great things about a printed map is sort of what I was saying before as well, is that often they remain unchanged in terms of their subject matter and their content, but their meaning can be very different depending on how they're being interpreted and by who. And I had moments like this sense many times, but the one that was, I suppose, the most profound one for me and the one that was quite a motivator for saying, oh, I think I should write a book about this, and these discoveries was a tourist map of Madrid. So on the face of it, it was just a simple map of the streets of Madrid produced by a German travel guide company. But it was only when I studied it in slightly more detail, I realized that there's something slightly amiss here in the way that the landmarks have been listed around the map. You wouldn't normally see that, because normally they'd be within the guidebook rather than on a big sheet of paper. But then also the discovery that on the top left corner of the map was a map stamp, and it was this stamp that had the Nazi insignia in it, particularly the infamous swastika, which indicated to me clearly where that map had come from, who it had been produced for, and potentially what its use could have been if the Nazis, for example, had invaded Spain, which they didn't do during the war, but it was certainly an option for them. That map suddenly goes from a kind of harmless tourist guide, which is what it was originally published for, into effectively, a weapon of war. And therefore its kind of connotations, its consequences, can be quite different to the ones that we might have imagined or maybe even the cartographer might have imagined when they set about creating the map in the first place.

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Dr. Christina Gessler (20:45)

In this section of the book, you say maps compel us to act on what they tell us, even if they offer only incomplete information. I sat with that for a bit. As a person who has a terrible sense of direction that I give maps a great deal of authority that they know where I must be even though I don't. You also tell us the map, the life a map leads is entirely dependent on whose hands it's in. Other examples, in addition to the one that you just gave, is that if a map of a forest is used by an illegal logging company, if a map made to help collect data about poverty and where the greatest need areas are in a particular area, it can be used by predatory loan companies to come in and harm those very same people. Interestingly, in this section you tell us you prefer a used map instead of a pristine one. Can you tell us about why the used map is more meaningful to you?

Professor James Cheshire (21:46)

Yes. So a used map is one that really evokes some of that history and some of those signs of use. So to take the example of the Madrid tourist map, if it were pristine, that is, if it were in the condition that it was in when it was originally produced, there would be no stamps on It. And so there would be no Nazi stamp, but nor would there be the stamp of the British military, which told me when that map transferred into British hands towards the end of the Second World War. And you can kind of get a sense of how intensively a map was used. So some of the maps were used for fieldwork, for example. And so they're all kind of tightly folded and very scruffy because they've been carried around in the outdoors by multiple generations of students. But they can also tell us something about the stories of the university and where they've been stored. So we had a couple of maps. Some of the older maps that we have are very thick in black, kind of grimy dust and dirt, which speak to the kind of polluted atmosphere of decades and decades of London. But also the fact that some of them may have been damaged in the Second World War when the university suffered from bombing during the Blitz. And some of these other maps that were acquired from war zones are shown as kind of, you know, they've got charred edges where they've clearly been pulled from a burning building or suffered water damage, where they may have been in a flooded basement or something like that. So, you know, simple things like that. Just whether a map has been damaged in some way and how it was damaged might then give you some clues about, you know, where it came from and the life it led before it became a part of the UCL map library.

Dr. Christina Gessler (24:06)

As you mentioned, the map library was there before the World Wars. You take us into a time period shortly after the Second World War where the head of the geography and geology department says he needs more funding. He wants to build up the collection and he asked for what's a fairly sizable sum for the time. And he wants to really reassess the collection, see how it survived and see what they need to have now. There's a moment in reading it where we doubt that he'll be able to acquire more maps. You take us into map use during the wars and sort of a co opting of maps. Maps were taken from people. They had a greatly political purpose. How would he even acquire maps now? And instead of my worry that he wouldn't find anything, they had an abundance of maps. Can you talk about the role of the Allies in going through and collecting maps on the European continent?

Professor James Cheshire (25:05)

Yes. So I've already talked about kind of a couple of the maps that were acquired in that way. So the Nazi Madrid map, but also the map, you know, maps and atlases that may have been pulled from burning buildings and that kind of thing. And so this was part of actually something that's slightly better known in the US and it's called the Capture Maps Program. And so Britain and its allies went across Europe, gathering up as many maps as they could. And this was part of a broader range of things. People may have heard of the story of the Monuments Men. It's the same kind of thing where they were going across the battlefields and trying to gather as much material as they could, either capturing it from Germans, but also trying to prevent it from getting into Soviet hands as well, because they were suspicious of the Soviet Union. And of course, with maps, they could be live and important military intelligence, if they had been recently produced, and so they might be directly diverted straight to battlefield groups, but actually much of the content was boxed up and shipped back to London, and they didn't really know what to do with it at the end of the war. So during the war, it was obviously classified. But at the end of the war, with the threat of Germany no longer present, there wasn't really a need to keep, you know, many of their maps classified. And indeed, a lot of, you know, German maps were themselves copies of British maps anyway. And so it was felt that they could go into university map libraries where there was this real need for cartographic material because it either been damaged during the war or lost, or there were kind of paper shortages and supply shortages and things, which meant the printing of maps for domestic use was prohibitively expensive or too hard to do. So these university map libraries suddenly found themselves, you know, being able to acquire kind of detailed maps of all of Europe and so on from this Capture Maps program. And it also extended into things like atlases, but also population maps around ethnographic mapping and things like that. Unfortunately, for the horrific reasons that we know about the Germans engaged in as well, particularly so there's this huge wealth of material. And in a sense, that's why the book is called the Library of Lost Maps, because actually, many of the maps that came in through this route became lost in the library because there was such a huge quantity of them. They weren't all catalogued in detail, and people didn't always know they were there. So lots of the maps that I was finding from this period I don't believe were ever used from the moment they were acquired to the moment I pulled them out the drawer.

Dr. Christina Gessler (28:40)

You take us into the people who make maps and why they make maps. Since we just talked about World War II, chapter seven is called manipulative maps, and we meet Mr. Dickinson, and we hear from his voice directly. He says, I recall the time when, after spending several months on the preparation of a model map that I subsequently learned form a basis of our bombing policy, I journeyed by packed train from Oxford to London, thence to a meeting of some 12 chiefs of bomber Command in Whitehall. I didn't have the cardboard map roll. I'd left it lying on the luggage rack in the train compartment. He goes on to talk about how they have to call over to Paddington and have a railway porter bring it. And we feel the weight on him that his ability as a map maker directly was used to kill people.

Professor James Cheshire (29:38)

Yeah. And I think that weight actually, you know, extends, you know, beyond just him and the idea of him as just a map maker towards academia more generally. And there are stories of often, most famously physicists like Oppenheimer and people like that being kind of co opted into service in a time of war. But there were pretty much any academic in a geography department in the UK and to a large extent in the US as well, they would have turned themselves to the war effort and would have been particularly suited to military intelligence roles because they had expertise in a particular countries. So in Dickinson's case, he was someone who was an expert in German cities and he was well known in Germany before the war and he had good networks of German academics he had worked with. And so for him to then kind of pivot from what working with these academics to then establishing kind of a basis the bombing policy, of which reason regions should be targeted in bombing, I think was something he struggled with. But it kind of extended towards the end of the war as well, and the immediate post war period, because it was also academics who were then tasked with interrogating Nazis, particularly those Nazis who were themselves in universities. And so there were these sort of interrogations that were going on on the basis of kind of expertise and knowledge. And if you read. I don't really talk much about this in the book, but going through some of the intelligence reports and the interrogations that happened on a couple of the sort of cartographers that I feature, these are almost like they read like academic papers or even books where there's often sort of a lengthy introductory section about the foundational ideas and concepts around geography in Germany, say, and then how they relate to the thinking and the behaviors of the person that's being interrogated and so on. And then at the end of these kind of interrogation processes, you then have the kind of big question about, well, is this person of any use to us in our ongoing intelligence, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union. And so rather than have this person potentially convicted or imprisoned for war crimes, could we make use of their services within our own intelligence operations, make use of their maps and so on? And so again, there's these kind of periods of reinvention that happens, and it kind of resonated with me in the sense that none of these people were kind of aspiring to kind of life and careers within military intelligence, but they became part of that infrastructure because they had expertise in mapping and map making. And so that's why they were, were used. And, you know, I could see how, you know, were I to be someone like that in that era, I would have been one of those people co opted into those roles as well.

Dr. Christina Gessler (33:55)

And you tell US on page 39, when the war came to an end, there was a period of soul searching, as many who had been involved both in its buildup and then in its dreadful conclusions, looked back on what they had done. Some geographers, like Dickinson, did so with a sense of pride. Others sought to rewrite or forget their histories to avoid the consequences of their actions, while still others, as we shall see later in the book, simply could not continue living with their guilt. Earlier in this chapter, you say what we use to educate the young has always been a battleground for political ideals. In this section, you're talking specifically about mats, and you note that by the time Hitler came to power in 1933, pupils for 12 years had been taught which lands were quote, really theirs through these map studies. This section gets into how eugenics was embedded in a number of different disciplines in higher ed. And while in the States, particularly if you look at social media right now, we tend to point to Nazi Germany, but Germany points to the US as a developer of eugenics. And indeed, prior to this time period, 1933, eugenics was taught not only in colleges and universities, but in high schools in the United States. So it was well embedded in various fields. You have a section called Charting the Way to Fascism. And on page 35, you talk about how maps are at war again in World War II. That's the section here where we. Robert Dickinson's and we hear a little bit from his unpublished autobiography, which I have read from. Can you talk about how maps, which many of us think of neutral of their data, we use them to find our way around, were part of Charting the way to fascism?

Professor James Cheshire (35:50)

Yeah, and it kind of relates to what you were saying about eugenics and the idea of kind of classification and kind of science as a kind of indisputed science. That kind of took hold at the time. So the idea that you could classify people into particular groups and that extended from physical ability and physical characteristics right through into ethnicity, religion, language, cultural affinity. There are these kind of ideas around how even someone's temperament was somehow a reflection of their physical environment. And so there were certain groups of people that were best equipped in terms of their temperament, but also physical characteristics to live in certain environments in highland areas versus lowland areas and all those sorts of things. And so when you start to combine these things together with the idea of the physical environment also informing the cultural, informing the sort of population characteristics as well, you can begin to imagine how a map is a really compelling way of combining those things and so producing maps, these so called ethnographic maps, for example, that put people into different cultural groupings that then created an order to the world, that then enabled so called scientific borders to be drawn around these population groups. And in turn, the maps becoming this very kind of binary view of who is part of one group and who is part of another. Now, of course, in reality, the world is way more complex than that. It may be that someone believes in a certain, subscribes to a certain religion, but that doesn't, you know, extend beyond that to what their political affiliations might be or their sense of belonging or their sense of national identity. And so maps created this very simplistic view of what is a very complex situation. And the reason they were able to do that was because they had become trusted sort of scientific tools. And so today we trust maps implicitly still. And that's because they kind of often have this dual purpose. It's sort of like you're using a map to navigate around a city, or if you're taking a hike, you depend on a map to get you to the end of the trail. And they have to be correct. And by and large they will be. And they serve the purpose very well. For those reasons, we then mix in many more of these kind of less tangible, more complex ideas around culture and identity. And that's what becomes messy. Because of course there is no single perfect answer or single perfect way of categorizing people. And that's where things become dangerous, because where you have ambiguity, you can then bring in the politics. And so what happened, particularly in the build up to the Second World War and in 1930s Germany, is this kind of very powerful mix of those in power knowing that maps were seen as sort of scientific points of truth, but also understanding that they could be manipulated or they could be used to present arguments and so combining those two characteristics of maps meant that they could be used to convince people of ideas and arguments because they trusted them, even if those ideas and arguments were, you know, really extreme in what they were seeking to achieve.

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Dr. Christina Gessler (41:49)

You tell us in this chapter that a Soviet spy named Rado is one of your favorite people to talk about. So I'd like to ask you to talk about him.

Professor James Cheshire (41:59)

Yeah, thanks. So he is someone who I like. You know, he's sort of a favorite character in the book because he encapsulates so much of, I suppose what I'm trying to say in the way that he kind of led his life. So he started out as someone who produced seemingly kind of innocuous maps for airlines, and then he did a travel guide of Soviet Russia, and then he moved into these political maps and he did these really interesting political maps that were from a very socialist perspective, which were quite rare at the time. In the 1930s and then during the Second World War, he was kind of infamous for being a hugely successful spy, largely based in Switzerland, and his cover for his activities was as a map publisher. So he used to publish maps for newspapers and things like that. And that was his the COVID for the work that he was doing. And then for various kind of reasons that I never really got to the bottom of, he was summoned back to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War, but escaped when his plane was going through Egypt and presents himself to British authorities there, who then interrogated him and ultimately handed him back to the Soviets. He then disappeared for a number of years before reappearing again as a map publisher based in Hungary. And at every stage, he makes much of the fact that he's a geographer and a cartographer and that he has this kind of skill set that will enable him, when he's trying to get out of British custody, he's talking about how he was invited to the US to talk about his maps and his kind of. The latter part of his life at the height of the Cold War, he was able to kind of become an integral part of the cartographic landscape, attending academic conferences, becoming a prominent member of the International Cartographic association, things like that, all the while being tailed by the CIA, who were still keeping an eye on him because they understood that he was able to kind of gather much needed geospatial intelligence information that he would then be taking back with him to Hungary and the broader Soviet Union. So he fascinates me because he, despite the knowledge of what he was and did and, you know, becoming. That was very common, he still was able to kind of operate as an academic, attending conferences. And indeed, I've spoken to people who have met him, who had met him and given him tours of. You know, he'd visit the British Library or the Royal Geographical Society and other things like that, in his role as part of the Hungarian sort of delegation to the International Cartographic Association. So he's, again, one of these stories that I'd never heard of, I think was reasonably well known in the 60s and 70s, but then has since been forgotten. And I only sort of found my way back to him through some of the atlases of his that we have in the library.

Dr. Christina Gessler (45:50)

There are so many interesting people that we meet in this book. Before we run out of time, however, I want to bring up at least a couple of the women who show up in the book. One is Lady Maria Calcott, who we meet in chapter three. I like her, she's very feisty. And in chapter 10, we meet Marie Tharp. Can you tell us a bit about both of those, please?

Professor James Cheshire (46:14)

Yeah, that's a good pairing, really, because both worked within geology and both kind of had to make a strong case for themselves for what they were doing or what they were believed in and in fact both were committed to sort of the wider communication of science. Colcott, she was a sort of renowned travel writer in the first half of the 19th century and she created an account in her writing of an earthquake she witnessed in South America. And a key part of the account was that she noticed that the level of the cliffs were actually higher relative to the sea level after the earthquake than before. So it was this idea that an earthquake could kind of shift the earth upwards. And she wrote about it and then I don't think gave it much further thought. And it was only a number of years later that another sort of a key character in the book, someone called George Bellows Greenoff, who was the president of the Geological Society, he kind of disputed some of these fundamental ideas around the things that earthquakes can do. And he picked on her account of the earthquake that she'd witnessed, basically saying she was kind of a hysterical woman who was not able to kind of give an impartial account because of the fact that she was scared in this earthquake and so on. And what's fantastic about Calcott is she then goes on the offensive and writes this kind of multi page defense of what she saw and what she did to completely pull apart kind of Greenoff's argument. And in the end she got the endorsement of Darwin, who went to the site of where the earthquake had been on his travels and said, indeed, yes, it would appear that the sea level had dropped, that the cliffs had raised. And so it was a very damaging thing for Greenhoff. But interesting how it kind of played out within the structures of science at the time and the sort of, particularly the kind of massive gender imbalances. So, you know, Colcott was unable to attend the Geological Society and present anything because women weren't admitted. She was the first woman to have any of her materials kind of published within the journal. And it was decades after her initial publication that another woman was to be found being able to publish anything. And so she'd inserted herself, she sort of inadvertently sort of inserted herself into this debate, but she played out the response in a very public way. Marie Tharp comes sort of a century later, really in the 1950s is when she first became kind of known for her mapping of the sea floor. And again, Tharp was operating in a very male dominated environment. In the times of oceanography, women were not allowed on research cruises, they weren't allowed on research vessels, so they tended to stay on shore and be given roles such as drafting maps and secretarial jobs and so on. And so it was a battle for women to get the recognition they deserved, kind of in terms of the primary science, the data gathering that was happening at the time. And so Tharp had this very close partnership with someone called Bruce Heezen, and he and her worked really well together. He was at the time sort of able to gather the data. Tharp later women were later admitted onto research cruises and was able to gather some primary data as well. But between them, they were able to consolidate data from these research cruises that were mapping the ocean floor. And she had this ability to create these things called physiographic maps, where she had relatively little data, but was able to suddenly take a couple of lines of data that showed you the topography of the ocean floor across the Atlantic. And she was able to fill it out, the entire map to show where the terrain was. And her approach was to ensure that everything was mapped at the same scale and that everything could be overlain on top of one another. So each sheet of paper was almost like tracing paper, and you could put it on a light table and. And you could layer them up. And what that meant was if you had different sets of data, you could put them on top of one another and validate your ideas. And so she kind of did all this alignment and noticed that there was a canyon down the middle of the North Atlantic. And then she was able to see actually that that canyon also lined up with where earthquakes were occurring. And the combination of that information was one of the kind of foundational ingredients to this idea of seafloor spreading. The idea that the Earth's plates are moving apart in the center of the oceans and that they are, in so doing, that's part of an engine to plate tectonics, which is kind of an idea that's really important today, but not one that was really settled until the early 1970s. And so Tharp was engaged in these academic debates at the time, and she had to. Kind of a lot of her work or a lot of her correspondence and stuff at the time relates to kind of making sure that she's getting the credit that that's deserved on the maps that she's producing. But she's become very well known now, I think, within cartography circles, at least, for these amazing maps of the ocean floor that she helped to create. And part of her legacy is the ability to pull together all this complexity into a kind of a single unified view of the world. But also, it's clear that she and Bruce Heezin and a couple of other people in their orbit were committed to communicating their science too, and working closely with famous designers and illustrators throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, where they were able to take the latest data and put it in the hands of the public through these amazing maps for Life magazine, Fortune magazine and National Geographic magazine. So she's a nice example kind of her story, the story of her sort of mapping the sea floor I think is kind of quite well told now and she features at a Google Doodle and other bits and pieces. But there's actually sort of additional layers here which I think we can all learn from, particularly around a commitment to communicating science and research.

Dr. Christina Gessler (54:50)

Another woman who appears in the book is Ann Oxenham, who is a keeper of the maps and specifically worked at your college attending maps in the map room. And we know about many maps today because of keepers of the maps like Anne Oxenham. We're starting to come to the close of our time together. There are so many more things I wish we had time to talk about. This book has scholarly infighting. It has spies, it has top secret information, it has nefarious uses for maps, it has thoughtful uses for maps. It takes us into the world of shopping online for map collections. Every possible way of thinking about maps is opened up for us in this book. You also tell us, coming back to the gravity of what maps mean to people and what happens when they fall into a particular person's hands, that you were writing in a time of invasion from Russia into Ukraine. This invasion is still going on. The war is still happening as we tape. And you tell us that Putin was so influenced by maps of the Soviet Union that charted the borders of what the Soviet Union had been and that he wished to restore, that his troops carried copies of those maps as they marched across the border into Ukraine. My final question for you is what do you hope this episode sparks for listeners?

Professor James Cheshire (56:24)

Well, I think, I guess two things. I think one is a curiosity in things that might be considered fairly mundane but in front of you. So I think one of the challenges with all maps actually is that they're taken for granted because we're used to seeing them, but particularly because paper maps seem like an almost like an antiquated thing now. And they're quite, you know, you see them, you might see them framed on a wall, you might see them in drawers, you may be in a department or somewhere, even a place of work where there's an old pile of maps, you know, give them a second look because you might be surprised at what's there and what they reveal. I think that's the first thing and then I think, slightly related to that. But the second thing is not to take maps for granted and actually to think of them more as great works of art and how we view and interrogate kind of great works of art, be it landscape photography through to portraiture or anything like that. We often think about the artist. We often think about the emotions that they evoke. We often think about what the intentions were for them and what the audience reception was. We can do all these things for maps as well, but we often don't. And so that's something I hope that, you know, if you listen to this and if you read the book, you'll understand what I mean and why maps themselves can be such interesting and kind of compelling things to study.

Dr. Christina Gessler (58:15)

The maps in the book range from 2 meters across to 1 that is barely 2 centimeters wide. Listeners can see them by logging on to libraryoflostmaps.com I've been speaking with Professor James Cheshire, author of the Library of Lost Maps, An Archive of a World in Progress. You've been listening to the Academic Life. Please join us again.