Category — GIS

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.

This comes to maptheuniverse via Courtney (with apologies to her for the delay in this posting!)

New York Public Library recently posted a short online video entitled “Mapping the World” that provides a behind-the-scenes snapshot of its map collection. The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division is the largest public library map collection in the world.

The library’s Alice C. Hudson walks through some beautiful examples of antique maps in the collection, and Matthew Knutzen highlights a library project that scans antique maps and georeferences them to present-day map layers, providing “snapshots” of an area over time in a geographic information system.

Thank you, Courtney!

[tags]map collections, new york public library, antique maps, GIS[/tags]

No doubt we have each, in our own way, been touched by the recent disasters in Burma/Myanmar and China. I just finished reading an interesting article that outlines the ever-increasing role of cartographers and GIS specialists in aiding and enabling humanitarian relief efforts in disaster zones.

• Zero hour: Natural disaster strikes without notice, triggering international rapid-mapping responses
• Minutes later: Geographical survey centres, like the US Geological Survey, send alerts to relief agencies. A simple location map is put online, with the epicentre identified. Other agencies add basic population information
• Within hours: Relief workers carrying GIS (geographic information system) technology are deployed to the affected region. They begin to gather updated information from the affected scene
• Once aid workers are on the ground: An On-Site Operations Co-ordination Centre is set up to co-ordinate the relief effort. Mapping information from the field is collated there
• Within 48 hours: The latest field information is combined with accurate 1:5,000,000 “base maps” to form the first complete maps of disaster-zone data
• In following days: A daily routine emerges, with basic maps updated every 24 hours. Bespoke maps requested by relief workers can now be constructed within hours

GIS technology is advancing quickly, enabling non-governmental organizations like Map Action to respond rapidly with new maps, but the technology is still expensive and continues to rely on workers on the ground, as mentioned in a previous post.

[tags]mapping, GIS, cartography, disaster relief, China, Burma, Myanmar[/tags]