News Releases

Osher Map Library Lecture Explains Uses of GIS

March 21 , 2006

Geographic Information System (GIS) expert Rosemary Mosher and environmental historian Edward L. Hawes will present an Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education (OML) lecture, “Forensic Cartography: Using Historic Maps and GIS to Explore Pollution, Ethnicity and Class in Nineteenth Century Portland.” The lecture will take place 6:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 4, on the seventh floor of USM’s Glickman Family Library, Forest Ave., Portland, and will be preceded by a reception at 6 p.m. hosted by the Osher Library Associates.

The lecture is offered in conjunction with OML’s current exhibition, “The Changing Peninsula: Two Centuries of Portland Maps and City Views.” The exhibition chronicles the transformation of the Portland Peninsula from 1776 to the present through a selection of maps, views, photographs, books, postcards and ceramic artifacts. It is open through July 31, 2006, and can also be viewed on OML’s Web site: .

Rosemary Mosher is co-founder of Orbis LLC, a digital mapping firm which focuses on land use investigations and employs GIS to create maps that identify and present historical, archaeological, and environmental information. She will discuss how historical forensics—recreating past landscapes using GIS technologies—can show Portland’s physical and cultural landscape from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Examples of her composite maps in the exhibition, which overlay contemporary aerial photographs with historic maps, can be seen at http://www.usm.maine.edu/maps/exhibit13/13-01portland.htm.

Edward L. Hawes is an environmental historian, consultant, and author of the report “Historic Sources of Pollution in Portland Harbor, 1840-1970.” Summaries of Hawes’ report will be available at the lecture.

For more information regarding this event please contact USM’s The Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at 207-780-4850 or oml@usm.maine.edu.

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