This week we’ll think about the history of cartography, cartographic historiography, map collections, and the history of mapping as a method in the social sciences and other fields.
TODAY’S AGENDA:
- GUEST, 6-7pm: Garrett Dash Nelson, Ph.D., Curator of Maps and Director of Geographic Scholarship, Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library
- Reading Discussion
- Map Critique
TO PREPARE FOR TODAY:
- Read about the amazingly ambitious four-decade History of Cartography project, some of which is available to you free online: “The History of Cartography, ‘the Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever Undertaken,’ Is Free Online,” Open Culture (August 2, 2018). Now, read a couple samples from the collection:
- J. B. Harley, “The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography” In J.B. Harley and David Woodward, Eds., Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Vol. 1 of The History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): 1-6 [stop at “Antiquaries, Collectors…”].
- Skim through volume 2 – on non-Western cartographic traditions – and glance at any chapters that pique your interest!
- Check out the Library of Congress’s “Maps That Changed Our World” < story map >.
- Browse through the David Rumsey Map Collection, as well as the Leventhal Center’s collections and its current “Bending Lines: Maps and Data from Distortion to Deception” online exhibition.
- Read Sarah Williams, “Big Data for Cities Is Not New,” Data Action: Using Data for Public Good (MIT Press, 2020): 1-48; focus on pp. 10-30 [for more on this topic, see Vaughan, below] [recall that you’ll be prompted to log in to access copyrighted materials].
- Watch Brian Thom, excerpt from “Ethnographic Approaches to Indigenous Mapping,” University of British Columbia (February 26, 2020) < video >: focus on 8:50 to 16:30.
- Optional!: Skim Jo Guldi’s “What Is the Spatial Turn?,” Spatial Humanities (Scholars’ Lab, 2011) and consider how space – and by extension, cartography – became a critical framework in various fields of scholarship and practice [n.b.: skip the section on architecture 😬; for more on design applications, see Gissen, Shanken, Söderström, and Vaughan below; thanks to Geoff Boeing and Diogo Pereira Henriques for the references]. You might also want to Google the “spatial humanities.”
- Recommended Listening: Max Richter, “Cartography”
Supplemental Resources:
- Jane Addams and the Residents of Hull House, Hull House Maps and Papers (1895).
- C.W. Anderson, Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt (Oxford University Press, 2018): esp 65-66.
- Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, MIT Urban Science Lecture Series (December 1, 2020) < video: 1:05:27 >.
- Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, with Saidiya Hartman and Robert Gooding-Williams, “Du Bois Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America,” Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University (November 28, 2018) < video: 1:57:46 >.
- Biblioteca Nacional de España, “Maps, the Eyes of History” < video: 5:48 >.
- Anne Bordeleau and Liana Bresler, “Drawing the Map: Siting Architecture,” Footprint (2010): 45 – 58
- Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750 – 1860 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
- “DuBois Data Portraits,” WABE (February 19, 2019) < video: 3:16 >.
- John Delaney, “Sociology and Economics (“Moral Statistics”)” in First X, Then Y, Now Z: Landmark Thematic Maps (Princeton University Library, 2012).
- Elizabeth Della Zazzera, “First You Make the Maps,” Lapham’s Quarterly (2019).
- David Gissen, “Architecture’s Geographic Turns,” Log 12 (2008): 59-67.
- Amy Hillier, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Social Survey Movement,” in Cartographic Modeling Lab, ed., PhillyDotMap: The Shape of Philadelphia (2009).
- “History of cartography”-related posts on the Worlds Revealed: Geography & Maps at the Library of Congress blog.
- Patricia Murietta-Flores and Bruno Martins, “The Geospatial Humanities: Past, Present and Future,” International Journal of Geographical Information Science 33:12 (2019).
- B. Robert Owens, “Mapping the City: Innovation and Continuity in the Chicago School of Sociology,” American Sociologist 43 (2012): 264-93.
- Timothy Pachirat, Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power (Routledge, 2018): 54 – 57 [on Du Bois’s prescience as an ethnographer and cartographer].
- Anita Say Chan, “Feminist Data Futures and the Relational Infrastructures of Protest,” DataBite 133, Data & Society (2020) < video: 15:15 – 26:00, especially from 22:30 to end >.
- Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in 19th Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2012) + companion website.
- Andrew W. Shanken, “The Visual Culture of Planning,” Journal of Planning History 17:4 (2018).
- Ola Söderström, “Paper Cities: Visual Thinking in Urban Planning,” cultural geographies 3:3 (1996).
- Clive Thompson, “From Ptolemy to GPS, the Brief History of Maps,” Smithsonian Magazine (July / August 2017).
- Laura Vaughan, Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography (UCL Press, 2018).