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This chapter examines the progress and developments in the study of medieval cartography in Great Britain during the twentieth century. Throughout the twentieth century the study of medieval cartography has been a wholly international activity. The three successive milestones in its development include the six-volume study of medieval world and regional maps by German Konrad Miller, the standard descriptive catalogue of late-medieval world maps edited by Frenchman Marcel Destombes, and the first volume of the History of Cartography. In all, British scholars have made a significant contribution to the study of medieval maps in the twentieth century, both intellectually and at the organizational level.

Chapter Two, “A Look Back” provides a comprehensive overview of secondary scholarship on the subject of Islamic mapping. It surveys the work that has been done on the Islamic mapping tradition from the eighteenth and nineteenth century until today. It discusses the growing emphasis on the importance of maps as material culture wellsprings of historical information.

Movement takes up an issue that transcends digital and critical invocations of the map: time. This chapter explores the historical development of animated cartography through a Deleuzian and Bergsonian framing

This chapter introduces readers to the topography of Alsace-Lorraine from the perspective of the migratory storks that fly over the region each year. It then introduces the concept of “cartophilia” as a passion for map making and map reading that spread across modern Europe from the late eighteenth century onwards. Cartophilia, the book argues, was inspired by European nationalist movements and made possible through affordable new printing technologies. The chapter also provides an overview of the book’s main contributions to the history of cartography, spatial history, and the history of European nationalism. It concludes with a description of the book’s six thematic chapters, each of which focuses on a different kind of borderland map.

Digitality traces the origin stories of digital mapping while attempting to understand the rather artificial ways in which ethics and creative thought is considered separate from technical experimentation. The chapter discusses the site of the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics in the mid-1960s.

Criticality traces the origin stories of critical mapping while attempting to forward a renewed agenda that sidesteps the baggage of the word ‘critical’. It proposes that the heart of this agenda is in our understanding of how maps disclose and stage information, how maps handle time and liveliness, and the responsibilities of maps and mapmaking.

This book is based on the Seventeenth Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography, “Mapping the Transition from Colony to Nation,” held at the Newberry Library in 2010. It considers the roles mapping has played in the passage from colony to nation—or, from dependent to independent nation-state. This chapter summarizes the general themes of the volume and the content of the eight chapters. Covering Latin America, Africa, Asia, these case studies all concern the engagement of mapping in the long and clearly unfinished process of decolonization and the parallel process of nation building.

But Do You Actually Do GIS? is the introductory chapter, which sets the stage for the interventions--the five factures--of chapters 2 through 6. Importantly, this chapter suggests that the relatively increasing interests in the mapping sciences in a variety of disciplines is related to the crisis of public confidence in higher education around questions of utility and relevance.

The introduction established the main argument of the book, which is that the U.S. Navy’s charts and its chart-making throughout the nineteenth century were integral to the expansion of American oceanic empire even as such effort exposed the limits of science practice, seafaring, and war-making in a dynamic, dangerous marine environment. The Navy and the broader American maritime world’s encounter with the ocean, mediated through science, was integral to the way mariners, navigators, and naval officers thought of an emerging maritime empire first in commercial terms and, by the late nineteenth century, in new geo-strategic terms. The introduction also places the larger work within the historiographies of military, maritime, and naval history as well as environmental history and the history of science and cartography, seeking to establish historiographical and methodological bridges among these sub-fields.

This chapter analyzes the region’s historical biogeography, especially the ways in which the region’s unstable colonial boundaries after the fifteenth century complicated attempts to understand whether its climate was in the temperate zone. In the New World generally and in the Northeast in particular, knowledge about the ecological boundaries of the temperate zone was highly imprecise. Because no new cartographical representations of the regional climate were produced in this period, its true character was subject to competing textual descriptions. By the late eighteenth century, prolonged debates about the local climate drew attention to problems with the traditional cartography of the temperate zone. As local naturalists confronted increasing evidence of latitude’s inadequacy for understanding the wide range of variations within the temperate zone, they adapted ancient concepts, arguing that the regional climate’s peculiarity could be more fully understood through firsthand observation.

Attention draws forward these historical accounts to the present moment of fixation on digital media. This chapter argues that ignoring the rapid pace of mediatization is disastrous for a community-engaged mapping impulse.

This conclusion emphasizes how the "Middle East" was the result of a constant interplay between extraneous conceptualizations and indigenous convictions. It recapitulates of this history of British mapping and mapmaking of the East reveals the multiplicity of cultural layers and forces that shaped the concept. It also questions the actual power of cartographic and geographical knowledge in relation to modern imperialism.

A Single Point Does Not Form a Line provides a kind of culminating manifesto for the slow map--arguing that instead of drawing lines and tracing drawn lines, that we make maps of traces. This short chapter provides a launch pad to begin to look anew at cartographies past and maps yet made to find their most resonate and responsible lines.

Quantification re-examines a perennial bogeyman for the critical social sciences, by exploring three underexamined facets of quantification in everyday life: interoperability and propriety, competition and habit, and fashion and surveillance.