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Monthly Archives

April 2023

    Touring Through an Open House: Navigating the William C. Wonders Map Collection’s Colonial Legacies

    by Guest Author April 27, 2023
    written by Guest Author

    This post was written by GIS Librarian, Larry Laliberte

    In March 2020, the University of Alberta William C. Wonders map collection sheltered in place as a global pandemic unfolded. It would be a year before staff could return in full, creating a disconnect from the physical space. During this absence, map staff began planning in-person map collection tours that would recalibrate the collection as evidence of extractive dispossession, rhumb the maps as anthropogenic fragments, and situate their containers in deep time.

    The following is a composite of three map collection tours, conducted in March and April 2023. 

    The tour starts in the wall map area on the first floor of Cameron library by John Speed’s 1627 ‘new and accvrate map of the world’. Beginning in the wall map space is an ode to the classroom visual methods utilized in academia during the 20th century. Here the map collection, with a heft of prairie settler geographies, is introduced. A collection seen through the contours (conceived, perceived and lived), of Henri Lefebvre’s production of space.1 A collection conceived, maps, makers, and curators representing the dominant order of society. Moving from wall maps to maps on a wall the tour shifts to the Digital Scholarship Centre’s (DSC) visualization wall. 

    The visualization wall’s serendipitous location, on-the-way to maps, allows for the tour to sit, and zoom & pan. In order to make use of the wall’s linear configuration, maps with greater width than height are utilized. Exploration maps created by, La Vérendrye, Thompson, and Palliser who traversed the prairies are examined along with Peutinger’s Roman roads and Waldseemüller’s map depicting a separate Western hemisphere. A virtual spinning Behaim Globe is displayed alongside the map collection’s physical reproduction providing a hands-on tactile experience. The tour group is asked  “what is missing from this 1492 European representation of the world”? Few notice it at first glance, that the eurocentric sphere does not display the Americas. As such, the globe is introduced alongside the anthropocene, becoming a golden spike, coincident with colonization of the Americas.2 Further anthropogenic evidence is drawn from Jens Munck‘s 1624 map regaling in the hacking of forests, while Henry Youle Hind’s 1858 map depicts wetlands as vast wet prairie easily drained. Jumping into the great acceleration of the 20th century, a montage of rail, road and pipeline maps rise and fall across the screens, documenting an increasingly fragmented landscape and burgeoning carbon footprint. 

    Stepping out from the spatial shadows of the visualization wall the tour makes its way to the fourth floor. This spatial procession, a transect of enactments within a library, fills in Lefebvre’s perceived production of space. The tour is asked to think of their immersive footsteps and elevation change while ascending the stairwell and portaging to the fourth floor where 250 map cabinets, 1000s of atlases and over 500,000 air photos await.

    The tour gathers in the map room. A space that serves both as an archive, and working area. Critically, in terms of an audible tour, it becomes a space for discussions and presentation in the lee of a library floor designated as silent. The tour obliquely examines a mixture of maps, atlases and air photos compiled when answering reference questions related to land use change over time.  These materials also serve as temporal slices that situate the collection, containers, and the tour in deep time. This is done by drawing upon the 1969 Atlas of Alberta with a plate detailing the precambrian shield “metamorphosed from the original slates into schists and gneiss”3 that is 2.5km (and 4 floors), beneath our feet. Utilizing a map displaying the retreat of the Wisconsin ice sheet in North America, it is noted that 21,000 years ago the tour (and our feet), would have been underneath 1km of ice.  Making use of a 1962 surficial geology map of the Edmonton area it is shown that 6000 years ago the tour would have been submerged under a glacial lake “ringed in primitive club mosses and lichen”. 4

    The tour finishes with the group encouraged to make their way, in quiet contemplation, given the floors designation, through a spatial maze of quarter sectioned map cabinets. To gaze upon a kaleidoscope of spatial renderings conveniently laid out atop those cabinets through the lens of Lefebvre’s lived space. One that emphasizes how a collection of god’s eye views that served as training materials for a generation of extractive managers, planners and academics might be reimagined, redrawn and digitally reconfigured through poetic, artistic, and even mystical ways. 

    In the next post we will shift from on site map tours to maps out on tour.


    References

    1.  wtf is geography?! [@WTFisGeography]. (2022, October 10). wtf is the “production of space?!” [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/WTFisGeography/status/1579484854580039683
    2.  Davis, H., & Todd, Z. (2017). On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 1(4), 761-780. Retrieved from https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1539
    3.  Godfrey, J. D. (1993). Edmonton beneath our feet : a guide to the geology of the Edmonton region. Edmonton Geological Society.
    4. Ibid

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    This content is licenced under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons licence.

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  • Staff Recommendations 2023

    by Sonya Leung April 25, 2023
    by Sonya Leung April 25, 2023

    As we say “Goodbye” to another academic term let’s say “Hello” to these staff recommendations! All recommendations are available with University of Alberta credentials, CCID/ONEcard or an L-Pass (required for recommendations available through Edmonton Public Library). From Janice Kung, Librarian (Health Sciences) Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World  by Matt Parker “It’s an entertaining and eye-opening read about how complicated our world is, and you don’t need to love…

  • Who are Geoffrey and Robyn Sperber?

    by Guest Author April 20, 2023
    by Guest Author April 20, 2023

    University of Alberta Library is celebrating the new Geoffrey & Robyn Sperber Health Sciences Library, which is anticipated to open in Fall 2023. This post is part of a series that will showcase the Sperber Library over the next several months. This post was written by Chief Librarian, Dale Askey Although it has yet to open, in the Library we already call the new health sciences library, currently under construction, the “Sperber…

  • Books for Western Canadian Adventures

    by Elisabet Ingibergsson April 18, 2023
    by Elisabet Ingibergsson April 18, 2023

    This post was originally published in July 2021 Planning and researching destinations for summer adventures is a favorite pastime of mine – and I usually begin early in the New Year. Nothing beats the winter blues better than curling up on a cold winter’s evening with calendars, google maps and guide books open in front of me. This year was no exception although back in January these plans were somewhat of a…

  • Discover Archives: Getting to Know Archival Descriptions

    by Guest Author April 11, 2023
    by Guest Author April 11, 2023

    This post was written by Digital Archivist, Maryna Chernyavska In previous posts, we introduced you to the University of Alberta Archives and some of the ways you can search our holdings, and shared some tips on how to search the Discover Archives database. Today, we would like you to get to know archival descriptions and how they help you discover archival materials. You might have noticed that Discover Archives database looks and…

  • Images of Research Competition and Exhibition Returns for a 6th Year

    by Junelle Mah April 6, 2023
    by Junelle Mah April 6, 2023

    The University of Alberta Library, in partnership with the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Graduate and Research Studies (FGSR), is pleased to announce the return of our annual Images of Research Competition and Exhibition (IOR). The IOR competition, digital exhibition and showcase for semifinalists preserves graduate research in digital form, providing an opportunity for graduate students to communicate their research in a different medium and capture the attention of new audiences. All…

  • Brilliance of Blunders: embracing our mistakes

    by Elisabet Ingibergsson April 4, 2023
    by Elisabet Ingibergsson April 4, 2023

    At this time of year, as the days move ever closer to the end of term, exams and deadlines loom large. Perhaps you find yourself multitasking and juggling deadlines – as you try to get it all done on time! It’s not surprising that an occasional mistake should occur. Don’t worry… we have all been there. In fact, some of the most brilliant inventions came as the result of – you guessed…

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