Towards the Automated Map Factory: Early Automation at the U.S. Geological Survey

Abstract

This paper is concerned with changes in map work at the U.S Geological Survey during the period from 1950 to 1974. At the start of this period, mapmaking at USGS was dominated by manual techniques organized to conform to twentieth-century advances in photogrammetry, drafting techniques, materials, and industrial organization. During the 1950s and 1960s, technologies that had been developed in other sectors of American science and industry were inserted into mapping processes with hopes of huge productivity gains and added efficiencies. The development paths of two in-house devices, Autoplot and Autoline, illustrate the ways in which cartographic automation became an agency policy as well as a powerful ideology.

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