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January 6, 2008

Maps: Most Interesting Article You'll Read Today

As a kid I used to have a drawer stuffed with maps under my bed. There were hundreds of maps in there, plus a dozen or so taped to my walls, ranging from the moon's surface to the Northwest Territories, and pretty much everything inbetween. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given that map-obsessed context, a piece in today's WashPost about an upcoming exhibit at Chicago's Festival of Maps gets my nomination for most interesting Sunday read.

While the article is nominally about a new exhibit, it turns into a fascinating rumination about points of view, the origins of maps, mapping technology, point of view, and how we know who and what we are.

To Inuits in the late 1800s, a map was a piece of wood with carved gnarls and pocks representing the coastal inlets of Greenland.

To ancient Greeks and early Europeans, maps were flights of fancy and horror, showing beautiful beasts and savage humans of uncharted lands.

Eighteenth-century Buddhists saw maps as moral charts juxtaposing landscapes of men's sensual desires and "infinite space." New World colonizers used maps as tools of conquest and empire, distorting size and shape to serve their self-interest.

As the piece points out, rather than distancing us from cartography, modern technology has brought it closer to us, embedding it in our daily lives.  The average person probably uses maps more today than they did a decade ago, thanks to web-based mapping and its mobile variants.

Some tidbit & quotes:

• "In early Christian maps, Jerusalem anchored the globe, with "Paradise" depicted in the East. "
• "In ancient Indian maps, everything revolved around the mythical Mount Mehru. "
• "A 12th-century Chinese map of the heavens, displayed at the Adler Planetarium, envisions the sky as a reflection of the Chinese Empire, where phenomena such as comets foretell earthly events, such as an invader approaching the Imperial Palace."
• "When Jesuit cartographers created a 1651 map of the moon's surface, they put the craters named after renegades Copernicus and Galileo in the Sea of Storms, while more favored scientists got a place in the Sea of Tranquility."
• "When France, Britain, Spain and Russia were competing for parts of North America, ... [the] same area expanded or contracted depending on whose territory it was and who was making the map."
• "A 1755 map by Englishman John Mitchell on exhibit at the Newberry Library shows states such as South Carolina, Georgia and Virginia stretching infinitely west in long horizontal strips, implying an endless claim to that latitude. All of French Canada, meanwhile, is crammed into a small corner."

As the piece points out, most cartographers never went to the Americas, so maps became works of imagination, desire, and political philosophy. The same holds in reverse, with three U.S. presidents having been cartographers -- Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln -- more than I can think of for any other country in Europe or North America.

And one last snippet:

During the gold rush, maps were used to lure prospectors west, showing routes to the gold fields and embellished with advice and enticements. One 1849 map shows a route from east to west all the way around Cape Horn in Chile, with an alternate route suggested through Vera Cruz, Mexico, and the caveat to "go in parties of 40 to 50 or more to avoid the danger of robbers."

Lovely stuff, and deeply thought-provoking.

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