A review by Sam Coale of  “The Forth Part of the World”, a “sumptuous, lavishly illustrated history of map-making and the visions of the world it incarnated,” by Toby Lester.

It is a fascinating, tortuously dogged (on the part of scribes and friars), meticulously detailed tale of how various maps came to be amid the humanist stirrings of Florence, the early Portuguese explorations of Africa, and all that “fed into a collective quest for knowledge, power, and wealth the likes of which had never before been seen. That quest was at once mystical, rapacious, evangelical, self-centered, grand, inspiring, and often delusional.”

Lester’s account, according to Coale, “sparkles with wit and tidbits.”  For instance:

The West became the “occident,” which suggests falling and dying, like the sun. “Oriens” in Latin means rising; hence the Orient, the East, Christ’s star, and why we use “orient” to describe finding our bearings.”

It looks like it is well worth a look.

An antique map of the world by cartographer Matteo Ricci from 1602 that shows China at the center of the world is on display thru April 10th, 2010, at the Library of Congress in the United States.

The map symbolizes the first connection between Eastern and Western thinking and commerce, and gained the nickname the “Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography”. It also identifies Florida as “the Land of Flowers”.

More information on the Ricci map can be found in a news release from the Library of Congress.

An interesting article from Spacing Atlantic by Matt Neville describing famous cartographer Joseph Frederick Wallet DesBarres and his roles in Nova Scotia.

As the article notes, after arriving in North America in 1756:

DesBarres was soon mapping the St. Lawrence River and working on his charts in Halifax during the winter months while teaching mathematics, astronomy, and surveying to a young James Cook.

In 1760, DesBarres began mapping the Halifax Harbour in preparation for the construction of fortifications and dockyards. Over the next decade he would also complete detailed hydrological surveys of the coast. The Atlantic Neptune, a large collection of charts and views of the east coast of North America was the result of his work, first published in 1777, and has been his lasting legacy.

This is the 3rd installment of a series on explorations through maps of the Halifax region by Neville called [Re]Presenting Halifax:

The overall objective is to re-present the city within the historical and contemporary socio-political, spatial, and ecological dimensions and challenges in a manner that helps to reveal opportunities and contribute to a wider discussion on current conflicts, debates and developments.

The first article is called, “Exploring Halifax Through Mapping“, and the second is entitled, “Against The Grain“.

A nice little overview of the work of the modern cartographer and cartography in the UK’s Independent can be read here.

“You have to create symbols that work with each other. There’s a hierarchy of information for each map and you have to make sure the important things stand out,” he adds. This involves communicating well with clients.

After 5 years of testing the 15th Century Vinland Map of America, a Danish expert has declared the map to be genuine.

Controversy has swirled around the map since it came to light in the 1950s, many scholars suspecting it was a hoax meant to prove that Vikings were the first Europeans to land in North America — a claim confirmed by a 1960 archaeological find.

Rene Larsen, rector of the School of Conservation under the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, said his team carried out studies of the ink, writing, wormholes and parchment of the map, which is housed at Yale University in the United States. Among the team’s conclusions:

…claims the ink was too recent because it contained a substance called anatase titanium dioxide could be rejected because medieval maps have been found with the same substance, which probably came from sand used to dry wet ink.

Read the full article here.

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.