California Map Society Conference

About

Join us for a gathering of map, history, art and science lovers, and hear from a superb group of speakers about historic and modern-day maps. Learn more about the California Map Society.

Schedule

10:45am Welcome remarks

10:55am Tom Paper: The Mistakes on Maps: A visually immersive journey through 20 historical maps, each featuring a fascinating flaw. Were these errors accidents, ambition, propaganda or fear of empty space? Along the way, see how trade, empire, faith and imagination bent geography.

11:25am Matthew Nachamkin: Filling in the Blanks: GeoGuessr and the Future of Mapping: Matthew’s fascination with mapping began with a video game, called GeoGuessr, which drops you somewhere on Earth using Google Street View and asks a deceptively simple question: where in the world are you? That question, it turns out, opens up something much bigger: a window into how the modern world is being mapped, and what it means that so many places are only now being seen for the first time. This talk will reveal how AI, drones, and Google's camera cars are pushing the boundaries of mapping technology, reaching places that have never before appeared on a map, from remote wilderness to interior spaces.

Lunch on your own

1:30pm Zoe Dilles: US Federal Land Records Research: The General Land Office Records Database (GLO Records) contains thousands of land records — maps, surveys, field notes, and patents — that document a multifaceted history of the American West and beyond. Zoe will cover Californian stories from this rich archive of land title and land use as well as tips on using this publicly accessible resource.

2:00pm Ed Lanfranco: Forbidden City Cartography: While starting to catalogue his personal collection of Beijing maps in 2025, Sinologist Edward C. Lanfranco stumbled upon a noteworthy subsection of holdings devoted to one particular place: the Chinese capital’s world renowned Palace Museum. This is a follow-up to an essay on the subject published in the May 2026 issue of our magazine, Calafia.

2:30pm Jayne Kilander: You Are Here: Transit Cartography & Spatial Identity: Jayne will discuss the role of transit maps in representing, impacting, and imagining the spaces they depict. You Are Here discusses the legitimizing impact of established cartographic languages, the way that mapping can empower or erase communities and imagine new futures for the places we travel to and from.

Break

3:10pm Josephine Arader: The Shaping of California Through Maps, 1846–1873: A 27-Year Cartographic Transformation: This presentation examines four maps of California produced between 1846 and 1873 to illustrate one of the most rapid regional transformations in modern history. In just 27 years, California shifts from a sparsely mapped northern province of Mexico to a fully surveyed and infrastructurally integrated American state. The maps Josephine has chosen provide a concise visual record of how quickly a landscape can be redefined when political change, resource discovery, and technological expansion converge. 

3:50pm Keynote: Julie Sweetkind-Singer: Spatial at Stanford: Mapping the Past to get to the Present: Over the past 25 years, Stanford Libraries has become a leader in providing spatial information and technologies to not only the Stanford campus, but to scholars and the general public around the world. Julie will walk us through this history, from the first grant to scan materials from the Stanford Geological Survey, to finding hidden map treasures in the basement of the Mitchell Earth Sciences building, scanning unparalleled Bay Area map collections, building the David Rumsey Map Center, and creating digital resources, interfaces, and tools to expose content and make it easier to use.

4:30pm Close

Registration

The event is available to attend in-person or remotely. Registration is required.