Review of the Article Rethinking Maps by Kitchin and Dodge Progress in Human Geography
Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, Allen Lane, London, 2012, 544 pages. £ thirty.00, hardback, ISBN: 9781846140990.
See Martin Dodge's most recent contributions to Club & Space: Codes of Life: Identification Codes and the Machine-Readable Globe
Maps don't mirror the landscape. Instead, they actively transform territory in service to sure interests. Beyond over 500 pages Jerry Brotton explores this theme by focusing on twelve distinct "biographies" of world maps and their makers from a range of time periods. His overarching perspective is admirable yet at the same time challenging, equally he aims at describing the complex enrollment of maps in terms of "the creative processes through which they tried to resolve the problems faced by their makers, from perception and abstraction to scale, perspective, orientation and projection" (page thirteen).
Through his twelve instance studies Brotton assuredly exposes the "underground" of cartographic selectivity, and while this won't be news to geographers and allied academics, it is still worthwhile to set out for full general reader. Brotton shows how the subjective and deeply political nature of selectivity over what gets mapped goes a long way dorsum into the history of cartography; for instance he quotes from Ortelius' famed 1570 Theatre of the World atlas:
"in some places, at our discretion, where nosotros thought expert, we take altered some things, some things we have put out, and other where, if it seemed to be necessary, nosotros have put in" (page x).
Brotton is an academic populariser, seeking to communicate to wider audiences. In this office he proved to exist an enthusiastic and charismatic onscreen scholar, able to comport a major iii role documentary serial near maps (BBC 2010). While this volume is scholarly in its themes, draws on academic literature, and has over 30 pages of endnote references, it has been clearly conceived as a cross-over championship targeted to a smart science-orientated full general readership, aided by the trade printing approach of Allen Lane and the marketing might of its Penguin parent. Information technology was out in time for the Christmas 2012 volume charts and received wide and agreeable coverage in the mainstream media.
A History of the World in Twelve Maps displays an erudite and at times eloquent narrative style. As a storyteller Brotton is superior to most academic writers, but its sober and serious approach might be wearisome for people seeking a low-cal read about pretty maps. It is also lacking in anecdotal wit and personal association, which can aid the manual of complex ideas to wider audiences (in relation to cartography this was washed with aplomb past Mike Parker in his Map Addict book, 2009). It remains to been seen if Brotton'south thematic review of the history of cartography tin really engage in the mode of other before spatially fixated "smash-hit" books like Simon Winchester's (2001) volume on William Smith'due south geology map or Dava Sobel'due south (1995) Longitude.
For a book about maps, aimed at a crossover marketplace, the illustrations tin be a useful offshoot to the intellectual statement and a vital selling point. This volume has plenty—nearly xl figures and over fifty illustrations—, just these are often too small, with many crowded onto a couple of color plate sections. The result is that many images are divorced from the relevant point of discussion in the text (strangely there is no cross-referencing to point the reader to the right page for the color plate). The small format of the book likewise does no favors for the reproduction of some of these maps: they lack visual impact on the page and arrive hard for the reader to imagine why they originally had such power to shape collective worldviews.
Certainly A History of the World in Twelve Maps does not have visual "wow" gene of a coffee-table volume, but every bit at that place is non much meat for an academic monograph. While there is enough of informative description, in that location does not appear to exist any really new empirical information from main research. More importantly, at that place are no new theoretical arguments, simply a restatement of well-known conceptual themes. The overarching argument is the view from higher up and the way in which "the powerful" sought to deploy maps to advance their case to control infinite and resource. There is nothing really about how mapping emerges through do for different audiences, or how people were or were non using the map, or creating other mappings as means of resistance to hegemony. Mapping is more than controlling space. It is much more than ability at play; indeed maps can be simply about play (cf. Dodge et al. 2009)! Brotton's book is in many respects a conventional disquisitional deconstruction of different maps, yet arguably the leading edge of academic discourse around the cartographic every bit "post-representational," looking beyond the power of the image to say something most practices that bring mapping into being (e.k. della Dora, 2009; Kitchin and Dodge, 2007).
Why twelve maps?
"These twelve maps were created at especially crucial moments, when their makers took assuming decisions about how and what to represent. In the process they created new visions of the world that aimed not merely to explain to their audiences that this was what the world looked like, simply to convince them of why it existed, and to testify them their own place within information technology" (page 13). But has Brotton chosen the right topics for his visionary tales? And why twelve maps? Is this too many? The classic psychological aphorism is that the optimal number items for people to consider is seven, plus or minus ii (Miller, 1956).
More fundamentally there seems to be no real intellectual logic for his choice of these particular twelve maps. Equally a set they are not comprehensive, nor representative beyond history or geography. 5 out of Brotton'southward twelve selected maps are from the narrow i-hundred-and-fifty-odd-yr "age of discovery" and ascent of European nations to world powers. None were selected from the nineteenth century and only three were selected from the twentieth century. There is cipher on thematic mapping or statistical display that underpinned the rise of industrial capitalism or governmentality by central state bureaucracies. The older map exemplars are harder to bring live because less is known about their makers and the artefacts themselves seem alien to our spatial conventions.
Brotton seems much more comfortable talking virtually the familiar cartographic "canons" of the Renaissance, rehearsing the significance of Blaeu, Mercator and Waldseemüller's maps. This is unsurprising as this period is Brotton's forte—he is currently Professor of Renaissance Studies at QMUL and he wrote in detail about these mapmakers in his 1997 book Trading Territories.
For anyone who knows something of the history of cartography and the changing formulation of world space, so his selection forms a pretty conventional prepare of steppingstones along a well-known path: from Ptolemy's beginning global filigree to Peters' re-projection of the World for supposedly egalitarian ends, with its undue foci on the Renaissance European master mapmakers. Many scholars of cartography—and map geeks—will discover the selected exemplars quite hackneyed by over-familiarity, and as well often associated with "glorious" tropes of the upward sweep of (largely western) map history. Why not challenge these conventions and go for some oddities or cartographic artifacts that counter accepted narratives that mapping is all almost "discovery," "empire" and "money?" Here maps are all about science and survey knowledge; they are too serious to get out whatsoever space for fun or frivolities.
The choice of Peters' project as the focus of the second to terminal chapter in the book is a peculiar selection in some respects—this map matters to cartographers but does it actually illustrate a fundamentally shifting globe view in the postal service-war menses? Why not views of Earth from space taken by the American astronauts at the meridian of the Cold War? The last instance written report chosen past Brotton is Google's global vision in 2012 and this seems like a tokenistic nod to contemporary mood. But and then why not consider MapQuest, the real cyberspace pioneer from the mid 1990s, or perhaps the bear upon of TomTom's get-go mass-market satnav device launched in 2004?
The temporal ordering of chapters—from Ptolemy's projection to Google's global vision—is a logical way to go on simply does non assist engage the reader. Why non start with maps people use today? The selection and structure of this book are problematic because they heavily imply a narrative of continuous technical progress from a crude past to a sophisticated present, although in the introduction Brotton is at pains to say he is non falling into this trap:
"each map is equally comprehensible and as logical to their users every bit the other, be it the medieval Hereford mappa mundi or Google's geospatial applications. The story told hither is therefore a discontinuous 1, marked by breaks and sudden shifts, rather than the relentless accumulation of increasingly authentic geographical data" (page 14).
Info-mapping
Somewhat more original is Brotton's focus on the significance of technological developments in mapmaking and external drivers from the wider scientific milieu. This is welcome and well handled. For me the virtually interesting chapter was the last one, focused around the emergence of Google Earth from technical obscurity into pop culture. In many ways this truly enchanting slice of spatial software offers a highly original world view. Even after repeated use it all the same has the chapters to engender a empty-headed feeling in me as I swoop through gigabytes of GI streaming seamlessly from some distant server onto my screen. The thrilling ease of use of this software arrangement belies a bloody past and a possibly greedy hereafter. Google Earth has much baggage from its militaristic antecedence, and while it appears to be a free adept, open to all, its goal is about (re)constructing a political economy of cartographic information that will drive profits into the coffers of a new course of mapmakers (Zook and Graham, 2007).
Every bit you lot expect upon GE'southward beautiful digital world, i should besides call up that it is starring right dorsum at you lot—Google'southward compelling mapping services are in many means the apogee of covert corporate surveillance of customers' activities. The "do no evil" ethos espoused by coders of Google comes out a Californian techno-centric 'frontier' vision of the earth, one that should be fabricated "free" for liberal capitalism by engineering "solutions" that come essentially without social responsibilities. Technology is subtly sold as a ways for comeback. Indeed, Brotton, at times, near seems to autumn for this ideology of ideals-gratis access:
"It seems that anywhere on the world can potentially at present be seen and mapped past anyone online, without the inevitable subjective bias and prejudice of the cartographer" (page 407).
Elsewhere Brotton is more critical. Notwithstanding, he makes a real stretch when he tries to summarize in a single chapter fifty plus years of developments in digital ciphering, information theory and the emergence of GIS-based mapping. Here he tends to make connections with historical hindsight that probably did not be for the people at the fourth dimension. While he underplays the significance of the armed services and Common cold War imperatives (and he recounts the mutual myth that the net was congenital to survive a nuclear assault), Brotton concluding sentiment is well spotted: "the history of maps has never previously known the possibility of a monopoly of valuable geographical information falling into the hands of one visitor" (page 433).
Whether such a mapping monopoly volition be realised remains unclear. It is interesting to speculate whether the concluding few years represent the high-betoken for "gratis" online availability of worldwide mapping, driven by vehement competition for audience share and the willingness of Google and a few other large cyberspace corporations to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on spatial information and overhead imagery. As bookish geographers nosotros have been naïve about the significance Google's power not simply in mapping but in shaping virtual geographies, which are coming to determine the access, allocation and the particular meanings we attach to places. Time is ripe for a more than critical mapping of Google's worldview.
In determination this book is a curious hybrid. Information technology tries to be a scholastically populist volume just information technology rather fails as information technology has too much detail for many lay readers. 1 could dissimilarity Brotton'southward solid and somewhat pedestrian approach to Simon Garfield'due south "pop-science" effort. The two books came out almost simultaneously and cover like ground. However, Garfield'southward book On the Map (2012) is written in more bite-sized chunks and bullet points of insights, all wrapped in a bright cartoon encompass map. Overall, The History of the World in Twelve Maps is a worthy book on cartography, but 1 that falls awkwardly betwixt two stools—likewise much descriptive width for some and not enough intellectual depth for others.
References
BBC (2010) Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession. A 3-part BBC4 goggle box documentary.
Brotton J (1997) Trading Territories: Mapping the Early on Modern Globe. London: Reaktion.
della Dora V (2009) Performative atlases: Memory, Materiality and (Co)authorship. Cartographica 44(4): 241-56
Contrivance K, Kitchin R and Perkins C (2009) Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory. London: Routledge.
Garfield S (2012) On the Map: Why the World Looks the Manner It Does. London: Profile Books.
Kitchin R and Contrivance M (2007) Rethinking maps. Progress in Homo Geography 31(3): 331-44.
Miller GA (1956) The magical number seven, plus or minus 2: Some limits on our chapters for processing information. Psychological Review 63(2): 81-97.
Parker Thousand (2009) Map Addict. London: Collin.
Zook MA and Graham M (2007) The creative reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the privatization of cyberspace and DigiPlace. Geoforum 38(half-dozen): 1322-43.
Source: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/a-history-of-the-world-in-twelve-maps-by-jerry-brotton
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