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A version of our world where we are not dependent moment-by-moment on GPS tracking and Location Services is quickly becoming more and more unimaginable. So it was fascinating, then, that in his September 5th and 6th talks—delivered as part of Information Ecosystems: A Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar at the University of Pittsburgh—Matthew Edney asked that audience members think critically about these various mapping services and how deeply reliant we have become on them as a source of supposed “truth.” Long before GPS—and even long before TomTom, if you’re old enough to remember those—Edney pointed out that mapping and the so-called “field” of cartography has fundamentally shaped our conceptions of the world: how we visualize and are capable of visualizing it, how we are able to move and think about moving around it, and the many iterations of land-as-property documented over many centuries of maps. Edney’s new book, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, does an excellent job of providing readers with a timeline of then-to-now. Cartography utilizes an impressively apt epilogue to the “Introduction”: “there is no such thing as cartography, and this is a book about it.” He helpfully framed his talks with this same quotation. By “there is no such thing as cartography,” he explained, he means that what cartography as a “field” purports to be is too loosely defined, too widely varying, too steeped in political motivation to cohere as a truly organized area of thought and practice; to quote Edney again, “the ideal of cartography is the entire belief system, while cartography Read More

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In: Matthew Edney
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At first glance, the map may not look like a data-dependent project. But with Matthew Edney’s guidance, the data of cartography became clear at the inaugural Friday lunch seminar in Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) From the Quantitative to the Digital Age. Edney, the Osher Professor in the History of Geography at the University of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine, does, however, work with data. Maps, Edney’s specialty, require a lot of data, as it turns out. And the appearance of the finished map depends on what data is collected, for whom, and why. As Johanna Drucker has reminded us, the information scholars work with isn’t given as much as taken, hence her alternate term for “data” – “capta.” That concept is clear in Edney’s work, and in the lively discussion that took place during the Sept. 6 seminar, which included Edney and more than twenty Sawyer Seminar participants from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University. Edney’s 1997 book, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843, argues that the British did not record the geographical boundaries of India so much as they invented the space called India to fulfill their imperial ambitions. His new book, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, puts into tension the ideal of a map – that it is a completely accurate, objective representation of geography – with its reality – that it is in fact a representation of Drucker-esque capta, with all the subjective decisions that go along with amassing that capta. That’s a Read More