Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include. In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same.
Author(s): Matthew H. Edney
Publisher: The University Of Chicago Press
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 324
Tags: Cartography, History
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Conventions Used in This Book......Page 14
1. Introducing the Ideal of Cartography......Page 16
2. Seeing, and Seeing Past, the Ideal......Page 24
Satire, Critique, and a Persistent Ideal......Page 26
Breaking Free of the Ideal......Page 41
3. Cartography’s Idealized Preconceptions......Page 65
Ontology......Page 70
Pictorialness......Page 73
Individuality......Page 79
Materiality......Page 89
Observation......Page 91
Efficacy......Page 98
Discipline......Page 101
Publicity......Page 106
Morality......Page 110
A Singular and Universal Endeavor......Page 114
4. The Ideal of Cartography Emerges......Page 118
Systematic Mapping......Page 121
Mathematics and Rationality, Empires and States......Page 135
Seeing the World......Page 149
New Mapping Professions......Page 161
Mass Mapping Literacy......Page 166
Forging the Web......Page 178
5. Map Scale and Cartography’s Idealized Geometry......Page 181
Technical Points concerning the Numerical Ratio......Page 186
The Geometries of Western Mapping......Page 191
Projective Geometry, Numerical Ratios, and Map Scale......Page 220
Numerical Ratios and Map Scale in the Twentieth Century......Page 232
Map Resolution, Not Map Scale......Page 237
6. Not Cartography, But Mapping......Page 243
Bibliography......Page 254
Index......Page 296
