Category — Cartographic Terminology

The Brooklyn Rail has an essay by Trevor Paglen entitled “Experimental Geography: From cultural production to the production of space“.

In his article, Paglen notes several interesting thoughts:

When most people think about geography, they think about maps. Lots of maps. Maps with state capitals and national territories, maps showing mountains and rivers, forests and lakes, or maps showing population distributions and migration patterns. And indeed, that isn’t a wholly inaccurate idea of what the field is all about. It is true that modern geography and mapmaking were once inseparable.

Paglen also observes the historically indispensable use of map making as “a tool for imperial expansion”. 

Renaissance geographers like Henricus Martellus Germanus and Pedro Reinel, having rediscovered Greek texts on geography (most importantly Ptolemy’s Geography), put the ancient knowledge to work in the service of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Martellus’s maps from the late 15th Century updated the old Greek cartographic projections to include Marco Polo’s explorations of the East as well as Portuguese forays along the African coast. Reinel’s portolan maps are some of the oldest modern nautical charts.

Today, notes Paglen, a “cartographic renaissence” is taking place with the common everyday use of tools such as Google Earth or Mapquest:

we use online mapping applications to get directions to unfamiliar addresses and to virtually “explore” the globe with the aid of publicly available satellite imagery. Consumer-available global positioning systems (GPS) have made latitude and longitude coordinates a part of the cultural vernacular.

Academia, too, has been seized by the new powers of mapmaking: geographical information systems (GIS) have become a new lingua franca for collecting, collating, and representing data in fields as diverse as archaeology, biology, climatology, demography, epidemiology, and all the way to zoology.

Paglen goes on to postulate that although “geography and cartography have common intellectual and practical ancestors”, “they can suggest very different ways of seeing and understanding the world” and explains that the field of geography is no longer simply synonymous with cartography or even GIS and the observation of spaces, but has everything to do with the creation of spaces as well.

There was much ado regarding the recent “official” bequeathal of the Waldseemüeller map known as “America’s Birth Certificate” from Germany to the the Library of Congress (see earlier post). A comment from a reader pointed out that Waldseemüeller also created a globe gores (a map designed to be cut out and pasted onto a globe) to accompany his book, the Cosmographiæ Introductio (Introduction to Cosmography). It is the first globular map to depict the Western Hemisphere and the first to name “America”. Waldseemüeller’s globe gores has been in the possession of the James Ford Bell Library since 1954. The James Ford Bell Library and the University of Minnesota will celebrate the 500th anniversary of “The Map that Named America” this comingOctober.

The library has a site dedicated to globes and in particular, the Waldseemüeller globe gores, with some great detail photographs.

[tags]Waldseemüeller, globes, globe gores, America’s birth certificate, famous cartographers, cartographic history[/tags]

The oldest accurate chart of Scotland goes up for auction by auctioneers Lyon and Turnbull in Edinburgh on January 10, 2007. It was made from a voyage King James V took around Scotland in 1540 when the king, with several nobles, set out to subdue the unruly lords of the Western Isles. It is expected that the antique map will fetch upwards of $24,000USD.

The “rutter” (which takes its name from the French “routier”,) is actually a set of sailing directions. The original cartographer of the work was Alexander Lyndsay. It was later copied by French cartographer Nicolas de Nicolay.

The map is significant in that “the shape of Scotland [is] shown with considerable accuracy, but it is much more accurate than the later Gordon-Blaeu map of 1654 or the Moll map of 1714.”

Read the full BBC story.

[tags]Nicolay Rutter, Antique Maps, Auctions[/tags]

Hemispheres, United Airlines onboard magazine has an article about antique map collecting in this month’s edition called Maps, Globes and Legends. The authors write:

We asked, as noncollectors might, “Why maps? Why globes?” Stuchlik asked rhetorically, “Why any art? Why coins? Why stamps, ceramics, spoons?” Within an hour we came to understand: Maps and Globes are beautiful and capable of carrying the imagination all over the world, to different times, and throughout the history of human knowledge.

[tags]Antique Maps, Antique Map Collecting, Globes[/tags]

The 11th Symposium of the International Coronelli Society for the Study of Globes will take place in Venice, Italy (Vincenzo Coronelli’s native town,) September 28th to September 30th, 2007. Themes of the Symposium include:

..all aspects of the study of globes, especially the history of globes, globes in their historical and socio-cultural context, globe makers, especially Coronelli, globe related instruments such as armillary spheres, planetaria and telluria.

Visit the Society’s registration page to find out more.

Via: MapHist.

[tags]Globes, Coronelli, Famous Cartographers, Cartographic History[/tags]

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram at dfw.com has an announcement regarding the Fifth Biennial Virginia Garrett Lectures on the History of Cartography: “Mapping the Sacred” this coming Friday, October 6th, 2006 to be held at the University of Texas at Arlington Central Library.

The day will feature presentations by cartographic scholars from the United States, England, Israel and Lebanon, in addition to the opening of the Special Collections exhibit “Mapping the Sacred: Belief and Religion in the History of Cartography,” and will be followed on Saturday by the fall meeting of the Texas Map Society.

The lectures will focus on how religions of the world used maps to depict sacred ideas and, at times, to keep track of worldly territories. Many of the world’s major religions will be represented in the lectures, including Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Mormonism, and Native American.

The article notes that the cartouche pictured above from from Dutch engraver and map seller Frederick de Wit’s map of America, Novißima et Accuratißima Septentrionalis ac Meridionalis Americae, published in Amsterdam in 1680, illustrates a finely rendered baroque cartouche that uses a winged angel and an allegorical figure of a beautiful woman clothed in swirling drapery, carrying a small cross to represent christianity, while less appealing allegorical figures represent America (at left, with a feather headdress) and heresy or false religion (the figure at right, with demonlike claws on feet and hands.)

The public is welcome at all events.

[tags]Garrett Lectures, History of Cartography, Cartouches, Antique Maps, Maps and Religion[/tags]