Maps and the Ideas they Express - Preliterate And Early Literate Maps, Printed Maps Of A More Detailed Globe, Nineteenth Century: General And Thematic Mapping
human geography cartography space
Cartography, the art and science of mapmaking, began before the invention of writing and continues to be fundamental to an understanding of the phenomena it represents graphically. Although typically associated with Earth, or parts of this body, its methods are applicable to the delineation of both the microcosm and the macrocosm. Thus, there is mapping of the human brain on the one hand, and the mapping of extraterrestrial space on the other. The unifying concept in mapping is the representation of spatial relationships and their interactions, and nowhere are these approaches more important than in geography. This entry will be concerned mainly with the map as it relates to physical and human geography, although some attention will be paid to extraterrestrial mapping. There will also be some references to GIS (geographical information systems); remote sensing of the environment through aerial and space imagery; and computer graphics (including animation). These are the twenty-first-century developments of more traditional forms of cartography. As Marshall McLuhan has expressed it, maps are one of a select group of media, "without which the world of science and technologies would hardly exist."
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Other examples of preliterate cartography could be cited, but only a small number of such early maps have survived. A much larger corpus of maps of preliterate peoples of later times exists. In Russia in the early part of the twentieth century, a collection of more than one hundred so-called "native" maps was assembled, which included examples from Asia, America, Africa, Australia, a…
Meanwhile, Europe was awakening from the long period called the Middle Ages, between classical antiquity and the Renaissance. A map that expresses medieval ideas, while heralding the new era, is the T–O map from Isidore of Seville's earlier manuscript Etymologiarum. (These letters refer to water bodies: the Mediterranean Sea and the Don and the Nile rivers forming the "T…
The nineteenth century was a period of consolidation and diversification. Except for the polar regions, the main coastlands and islands of the world had been explored and charted at least at the reconnaissance level by 1800. However, much remained to be delineated, especially in the continental interiors (except Europe, which was reasonably well mapped by this date). Expeditions, mostly originatin…
These advances continued and accelerated in the twentieth century through such developments as the airplane and
Figure 10. Section of William Smith's geological map of England (1815).
photography in the first half of the century; and space probes and more exotic imaging in the second half. Although balloons were used earlier, it was only after the development of controlled flight, th…
Bagrow, Leo. History of Cartography. Revised and enlarged by R. A. Skelton. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. Brown, Lloyd A. The Story of Maps. Boston: Little, Brown, 1949. Campbell, Tony. The Earliest Printed Maps, 1472–1500. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. Coppock, J. T., and D. W. Rhind. "The History of GIS." In Geographical …
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