Tag: history of cartography

History of Cartography Project’s Fifth Volume Goes to Press

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The History of Cartography Project’s fifth and final volume, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, has finally gone to press, though the massive book will take two years to work its way through the production pipeline. It’s scheduled for publication in 2027.

(All previous volumes are available as free downloads in PDF format. So will volume five, once it’s been out for a couple of years.)

Previously: History of Cartography Project’s Fourth Volume Now Available Online; Forty Years of the History of Cartography Project; The History of Cartography’s Fourth Volume, Now (Almost) Out; History of Cartography Project Updates; History of Cartography Project’s Sixth Volume Now Available Online; History of Cartography Project’s Sixth Volume Now Out.

Exploring the History of Geospatial Software

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Ingrid Burrington is working on a PhD dissertation on the history of geospatial software and she’s posting through it. Two gems I’ve run across so far:

  • (How) do computer maps make money? “The first thing that seems important to state upfront, even though it seems obvious: the business of maps is almost entirely business-to-business, not business-to-consumer. Even if a digital map or geospatial product is consumer-facing, most of the money changing hands doesn’t happen at the level of the individual looking at a map.”
  • Notes on the history of the map tile. “Crediting the brothers Rasmussen and Google Maps with the map tile is sort of like crediting Steve Jobs and Apple for the smart phone: understandable but formally imprecise. Both are examples of a company taking technologies and user experiences that had been speculated on or experimented with and transforming them into the seemingly obvious, inevitable Way Things Are Done.”

When we talk about the history of cartography (and when I deploy the history of cartography tag) we usually think of something older than the goings-on in Silicon Valley a few decades ago: al-Idrisi and Mercator, not Dangermond or Tomlinson. But recent history is still history.

ICHC 2024

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The 30th International Conference on the History of Cartography will take place the first week of July 2024 in Lyon, France. Its theme is “Confluences—Interdisciplinarity and New Challenges in the History of Cartography.” The call for papers is open until 20 November 2023. Two associated exhibitions have already been announced, one on distant spaces, the other on maps and images of travel.

History of Cartography Project’s Fourth Volume Now Available Online

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The History of Cartography Project’s fourth volume, Cartography in the European Enlightenment, is now available online for free download in PDF format. This book, edited by Matthew Edney and Mary Sponberg Pedley, came out in hardcover in the depths of the pandemic; free online access a few years after publication follows the precedent of previous volumes in the series.

This means that all five volumes that have been published to date can be downloaded for free (here). The remaining volume—volume five, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century—is in preparation. When that final book is published, it will close out a project that has taken more than four decades to come to fruition.

Previously: Forty Years of the History of Cartography Project; The History of Cartography’s Fourth Volume, Now (Almost) Out; History of Cartography Project Updates.

New Books on Early Modern Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Three books that have come out or are coming out this year that deal with maps of early modern Europe:

Navigations: The Portuguese Discoveries and the Renaissance by Malyn Newitt (Reaktion, 24 Apr). “Navigations re-examines the Portuguese voyages of discovery by placing them in their medieval and Renaissance settings. It shows how these voyages grew out of a crusading ethos, as well as long-distance trade with Asia and Africa and developments in map-making and ship design. The slave trade, the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews and the intercontinental spread of plants and animals gave these voyages long-term global significance.” £25/$40. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World by Meredith F. Small (Pegasus, 6 Jun). A book about the famous Fra Mauro map. “Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith F. Small reveals how Fra Mauro’s mappamundi made cartography into a science rather than a practice based on religion and ancient myths.” $29. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Frames that Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps by Chet Van Duzer (Brill, 25 May ebook, 19 Jul print). I’ve been following Van Duzer’s work on horror vacui, the lack of empty spaces on maps, for some time (1, 2); that work seems to be taken up by at least the first chapter on this new book on cartouches, which is available for free as an open-access download. “This lavishly illustrated book is the first systematic exploration of cartographic cartouches, the decorated frames that surround the title, or other text or imagery, on historic maps. It addresses the history of their development, the sources cartographers used in creating them, and the political, economic, historical, and philosophical messages their symbols convey. Cartouches are the most visually appealing parts of maps, and also spaces where the cartographer uses decoration to express his or her interests—so they are key to interpreting maps. The book discusses thirty-three cartouches in detail, which range from 1569 to 1821, and were chosen for the richness of their imagery.” $144. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

More: Map Books of 2023.

Returning Maps to Their Context

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Interesting essay for the History of Cartography Project from Matthew Edney, on the practice of treating maps as separate from the books they were originally published in—and physically removing them from those books—and the damage that does, both to the physical objects and to our understanding of the past.

The key issue is that over many centuries, maps have routinely been removed from their original contexts without clear records being kept. These practices have been extensively countered and halted since the 1970s, however they have left a legacy that requires great effort to overcome. But that effort always pays off: resituating early maps in the original contexts of their production, circulation, and use inevitably allows for more new interpretations of their meaning and significance.

Forty Years of the History of Cartography Project

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

This article from the University of Wisconsin–Madison takes a look back at the 40-year history of the History of Cartography Project, which, with the forthcoming publication of its final volume, is actually coming to a close in the near future. Includes quotes from current director Matthew Edney, who first came to the project as a graduate student in 1983.

Previously: The History of Cartography’s Fourth Volume, Now (Almost) Out; History of Cartography Project Updates.

Upcoming Workshops

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Two workshops/courses coming in June:

Australian author and illustrator Kathleen Jennings will teach a workshop on fantasy mapmaking in June: the focus of Map Making and World Building is “on story and art,” the mapmaking illustrative rather than cartographical, and in general it seems to be about the relationship between map and story. The workshop will take place on 19 June both in-person (at the Queensland Writers Centre in Brisbane) and via livestream; tickets range from A$35 to A$100, depending.

A History of Maps and Mapping, a short introductory online course taught by Katherine Parker as part of the London Rare Books School’s program of summer courses, “will challenge students to destabilize and broaden the traditional definition of ‘map’, and to recognize maps as socially constructed objects that are indicative of the values and biases of their makers and the cultures that created them. Students will learn how to analyse and catalogue maps for a variety of research purposes, and to discuss changes in map technology and style without recourse to a progressive narrative of scientific improvement.” Matthew Edney will supply a guest lecture. The course runs from 29 June to 2 July and costs £100 (student) or £175.

Mapping an Atlantic World, circa 1500

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Amazon (Canada, UK)
Bookshop

Out tomorrow from Johns Hopkins University Press, Alida C. Metcalf’s Mapping an Atlantic World, circa 1500 explores how sixteenth-century European maps conceptualized a new, Atlantic-centred world. From the publisher: “Metcalf explains why Renaissance cosmographers first incorporated sailing charts into their maps and began to reject classical models for mapping the world. Combined with the new placement of the Atlantic, the visual imagery on Atlantic maps—which featured decorative compass roses, animals, landscapes, and native peoples—communicated the accessibility of distant places with valuable commodities. Even though individual maps became outdated quickly, Metcalf reveals, new mapmakers copied their imagery, which then repeated on map after map. Individual maps might fall out of date, be lost, discarded, or forgotten, but their geographic and visual design promoted a new way of seeing the world, with an interconnected Atlantic World at its center.” [WMS]

John G. Bartholomew, 100 Years After His Death

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

John G. BartholomewA short piece in the Edinburgh Evening News last April noted the 100th anniversary of the death of John G. Bartholomew (1860-1920), the fourth of six generations of mapmaking Bartholomews; their firm, John Bartholomew and Son, was responsible for the Times atlases before they were taken up by HarperCollins.

Speaking of his ancestor’s legacy, great-grandson, John Eric Bartholomew, told the Evening News that the fact John George Bartholomew is recognised as the man credited with being the first to put the name Antarctica on the map remains a great source of pride.

Little known is that, in 1886, Bartholomew had a brief flirtation with considering the name “Antipodea” for oceanographer John Murray’s map depicting the continent, before settling for Antarctica.

More about John G. Bartholomew at the Bartholomew family’s website and the NLS’s Bartholomew Archive. [WMS]

Previously: Robert G. Bartholomew, 1927-2017.

‘With Savage Pictures Fill Their Gaps’: Chet Van Duzer on Horror Vacui

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Chet Van Duzer’s presentation about the lack of empty spaces on old maps—horror vacui—at the November 2017 meeting of the New York Map Society has now been uploaded to YouTube.

As I’ve said before, the subject of empty spaces on maps is of considerable interest to my own research on fantasy maps: fantasy maps tend to be full of empty spaces not germane to the story, whereas real-world maps were covered in cartouches, sea monsters, and ribbons of text. As a result I’m very interested in what Van Duzer has to say about the subject, and have been looking for something exactly like this recorded talk for some time.

I wasn’t disappointed. Van Duzer lays out, with some particularly over the top examples, how empty spaces on maps were consumed (his term) by text, ships, sea monsters and other embellishments that were designed for that very purpose. Some of those embellishments were absolutely enormous, others curiously redundant: a single map does not need four identical scales or a dozen or more compass roses, for example. “Everything we’re seeing here was a choice on the part of the cartographer,” he says at one point; “all this information could be disposed differently.”

Previously: Horror Vacui: The Fear of Blank Spaces.