Onto Cartography

Defends and transforms naturalism and materialism to show how culture itself is formed by nature. Bryant endorses a pan-ecological theory of being, arguing that societies are ecosystems that can only be understood by considering nonhuman material agencies such as rivers and mountain ranges alongside signifying agencies such as discourses, narratives and ideologies.

Object-Oriented Cartography provides an innovative perspective on the changing nature of maps and cartographic study. Through a renewed theoretical reading of contemporary cartography, this book acknowledges the shifted interest from cartographic representation to mapping practice and proposes an alternative consideration of the ‘thingness’ of maps. Rather than asking how maps map onto reality, it explores the possibilities of a speculative-realist map theory by bringing cartographic objects to the foreground. Through a pragmatic perspective, this book focuses on both digital and nondigital maps and establishes an unprecedented dialogue between the field of map studies and object-oriented ontology. This dialogue is carried out through a series of reflections and case studies involving aesthetics and technology, ethnography and image theory, and narrative and photography. Proposing methods to further develop this kind of cartographic research, this book will be invaluable reading for researchers and graduate students in the fields of Cartography and Geohumanities.

“A compelling read” that reveals how maps became informational tools charting everything from epidemics to slavery (Journal of American History). In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past. All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map. Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.

Defends and transforms naturalism and materialism to show how culture itself is formed by nature. Bryant endorses a pan-ecological theory of being, arguing that societies are ecosystems that can only be understood by considering nonhuman material agencies

Maps of the Imagination takes us on a magic carpet ride over terrain both familiar and exotic. Using the map as a metaphor, fiction writer Peter Turchi considers writing as a combination of exploration and presentation, all the while serving as an erudite and charming guide. He compares the way a writer leads a reader though the imaginary world of a story, novel, or poem to the way a mapmaker charts the physical world. "To ask for a map," says Turchi, "is to say, ‘Tell me a story.’ " With intelligence and wit, the author looks at how mapmakers and writers deal with blank space and the blank page; the conventions they use or consciously disregard; the role of geometry in maps and the parallel role of form in writing; how both maps and writing serve to re-create an individual’s view of the world; and the artist’s delicate balance of intuition with intention. A unique combination of history, critical cartography, personal essay, and practical guide to writing, Maps of the Imagination is a book for writers, for readers, and for anyone interested in creativity. Colorful illustrations and Turchi’s insightful observations make his book both beautiful and a joy to read.

For more than thirty years, the History of Cartography Project has charted the course for scholarship on cartography, bringing together research from a variety of disciplines on the creation, dissemination, and use of maps. Volume 6, Cartography in the Twentieth Century, continues this tradition with a groundbreaking survey of the century just ended and a new full-color, encyclopedic format. The twentieth century is a pivotal period in map history. The transition from paper to digital formats led to previously unimaginable dynamic and interactive maps. Geographic information systems radically altered cartographic institutions and reduced the skill required to create maps. Satellite positioning and mobile communications revolutionized wayfinding. Mapping evolved as an important tool for coping with complexity, organizing knowledge, and influencing public opinion in all parts of the globe and at all levels of society. Volume 6 covers these changes comprehensively, while thoroughly demonstrating the far-reaching effects of maps on science, technology, and society—and vice versa. The lavishly produced volume includes more than five hundred articles accompanied by more than a thousand images. Hundreds of expert contributors provide both original research, often based on their own participation in the developments they describe, and interpretations of larger trends in cartography. Designed for use by both scholars and the general public, this definitive volume is a reference work of first resort for all who study and love maps.

WINNER OF THE CANTEMIR PRIZE 2012 awarded by the Berendel Foundation The Map Reader brings together, for the first time, classic and hard-to-find articles on mapping. This book provides a wide-ranging and coherent edited compendium of key scholarly writing about the changing nature of cartography over the last half century. The editorial selection of fifty-four theoretical and thought provoking texts demonstrates how cartography works as a powerful representational form and explores how different mapping practices have been conceptualised in particular scholarly contexts. Themes covered include paradigms, politics, people, aesthetics and technology. Original interpretative essays set the literature into intellectual context within these themes. Excerpts are drawn from leading scholars and researchers in a range of cognate fields including: Cartography, Geography, Anthropology, Architecture, Engineering, Computer Science and Graphic Design. The Map Reader provides a new unique single source reference to the essential literature in the cartographic field: more than fifty specially edited excerpts from key, classic articles and monographs critical introductions by experienced experts in the field focused coverage of key mapping practices, techniques and ideas a valuable resource suited to a broad spectrum of researchers and students working in cartography and GIScience, geography, the social sciences, media studies, and visual arts full page colour illustrations of significant maps as provocative visual ‘think-pieces’ fully indexed, clearly structured and accessible ways into a fast changing field of cartographic research

This book is an important volume in the series on the state-of-art research in Cartography and GI Science. It is a collection of selected peer-reviewed papers organized into contemporary topics of research, presented at the 27th International Cartographic Conference (ICC) in Rio de Janeiro. This is the 3rd edition of selected ICA conference papers published by Springer Lectures in Geoinformation and Cartography. The conference topic is “maps connecting the world,” and Brazilian cartographers and geo-information scientists are honored to welcome their peers from all over the world to the event, which will present some of the most important recent advances in cartography research and GI science. The most relevant papers will be selected for the Springer book and these will be organized into five sections according to topic area to provide a valuable cartography and GI science reference work

In this book the main trends, concepts and directions in cartography and mapping in modernism and post-modernism are reviewed. Philosophical and epistemological issues are analysed in cartography from positivist-empiricist, neo-positivist and post-structuralist stances. In general, in cartography technological aspects have been considered as well as theoretical issues. The aim is to highlight the epistemological and philosophical viewpoint during the development of the discipline. Some main philosophers who have been influential for contemporary thinking such as Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell, are considered. None of these philosophers wrote about cartography directly (excepting Kant), but their philosophies are related to cartography and mapping issues. The book also analyses the concept of paradigm or paradigm shift coined by Thomas Kuhn, who applied it to the history of science. Different cartographic trends that have arisen since the second half of the twentieth century are analysed according to this important concept which is implicit inside the scientific or disciplinary communities. Further, the authors analyse the position of cartography in the context of the sciences and other disciplines, adopting a positivistic point of view. Additionally, they review current trends in cartography and mapping in the context of information and communication technologies in a post-modernistic or post-structuralistic framework. Thus, since the 1980s and 1990s, new mapping concepts have arisen which challenge the discipline’s traditional map conceptions.

Atlas of Material Worlds is a highly designed narrative atlas illustrating the agency of nonliving materials with unique, ubiquitous, and often hidden influence on our daily lives. Employing new materialism as a jumping-off point, it examines the increasingly blurry lines between the organic and inorganic, engaging the following questions: What roles do nonliving materials play? Might a closer examination of those roles reveal an undeniable agency we have long overlooked or disregarded? If so, does this material agency change our understanding of the social structures, ecologies, economies, cosmologies, technologies, and landscapes that surround us? And, perhaps most importantly, why does material agency matter? This is the story of the world’s driest nonpolar desert, pink flamingos, and cerulean blue lithium ponds; industrial shipping logistics, pudding-like jiggling substrates, and monuments of mud; galactic bodies, radioactive sheep, and the yellowcake of uranium. Put simply, this book dares readers to see the world anew, from material up. Atlas of Material Worlds offers this new relationship to our host environment in a time of mounting crises—accelerating climate change, ballooning socioeconomic inequality, and rising toxic nationalism—uniquely telling materialist stories for practitioners and students in landscape, architecture, and other built environment disciplines.