ABSTRACT
This chapter will examine the role of public map exhibitions in the cartographic humanities, with particular reference to the activities of the British Library. After providing a brief history of public map exhibitions, I will study what goes into them by examining their ingredients: the host institution, the exhibition curator, the exhibited collection (maps forming the largest but by no means the only material type) and the audience. I will pay particular attention to the ways in which exhibitions create rather than merely transmit knowledge, and how they can reproduce the biases embedded in their exhibited collections. I will then look at what comes out of map exhibitions, discussing first the nature of engagement between audiences and the exhibition process itself, and second seeking to identify public impact through the measures used to assess map exhibitions’ current and potential future success.
