Summer Research Reports: Caleb Murray-Bozeman on Mapping Union Square

BCNM is thrilled to support our students in their summer research. Read about Caleb Murray-Bozeman on Mapping Union Square!

I used BCNM’s Summer Research fellowship to travel to Boston, MA to research and film an independent documentary about maps and neighborhood transformation in Union Square, Somerville. My research focused on historical maps that depict the area now known as Union Square, from the colonial period up into the 21st century. I identified maps of interest held in local collections (mostly at the Boston Public Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society, but also smaller collections like that of the Somerville Museum). I selected several dozen maps based both on their aesthetic qualities and on what they revealed about the myriad reasons for which people have mapped the area (and there are many: some maps promoted European settlement of the region, others served a military function, such as Revolutionary War-era maps of troop deployments and fortifications, still others were aimed at specific urban development projects, such as the construction of new roads or the filling of a local creek, etc.). Among the most exciting finds was a collection of maps on glass lantern slides at the Massachusetts Historical Society, which introduced a new medium where I had previously focused on paper maps. When possible, I then filmed physical copies of the selected maps, and animated digital scans of the maps.

While in Boston, I conducted interviews with people involved in mapping the area. These included an on-camera interview with a curator at the Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library, as well as an interview with the cartographer responsible for Boston’s transit maps, who walked me through the process through which he combines satellite images with other digital layers to create maps of local neighborhoods designed to help commuters and visitors navigate the area. I also used my time in Boston to experiment with new ways to record both these maps and the places that they depict – different angles, lighting, and camera movements, as well as different ways of editing these together. One of the challenges of the documentary has been finding compelling ways to juxtapose images of very different maps with images of and stories about the square itself; my research this summer involved trying new visual and narrative techniques to address this challenge.