History of Cartography and Experimental Geography

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.