facility:library of congress dillon

  • How the U.S. Maps the World’s Most Disputed Territories - Wired Science

    http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/01/state-department-maps

    When the United States decides to recognize a new government, or an existing country changes its name, Leo Dillon and his team at the State Department spring into action.


    A 2011 map of South Sudan made by the State Department’s Office of the Geographer. Image: Library of Congress

    Dillon heads the Geographical Information Unit, which is responsible for ensuring the boundaries and names on government maps reflect U.S. policy. The team also keeps an eye on border skirmishes and territorial disputes throughout the world and makes maps that are used in negotiating treaties and truces. These days, Dillon says, maritime borders are where much of the action is. (The recent political squabbling and military posturing between China and Japan over the tiny islands known as Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan is one potentially worrisome case in point.)

    Dillon’s been at the State Department since 1986, and he says his job remains as fun as ever. “The landscape of political geography is constantly changing,” he said. “Every day I come in here and there’s something new.” We spoke with Dillon to learn more about it.

    • Extraits :

      One case I worked on that was kind of fun involves a tiny island off the coast of Morocco. It’s very, very small. 11 years ago Morocco sent a few troops there and Spain swooped in with helicopters and expelled them and it became a big deal.

      Colin Powell was asked to mediate the conflict.[In Powell’s plan everyone was going to leave the island, with no prejudice as to who it belonged to. But the problem was the name. The Spanish wouldn’t use the Moroccan name and the Moroccans wouldn’t use the Spanish name.

      I was at a dinner party that Saturday night and I got a call from the Secretary’s staff saying that instead of a name they wanted to use the coordinates for that island.

      It’s a great example of how geographic names matter.

    • A propos du Kosovo :

      When we [united States] recognized Kosovo there were many sets of boundaries. The peacekeeping forces there were using boundaries that weren’t really the legal boundaries at all. Their job was to keep peace in a buffer zone, so they’d set up working boundaries in a way that made it easier for them to keep people with guns apart.

      The names were an issue. Before, Serbian names were all we used, but now the State Department said we can’t do that, we have to use both Serbian and Albanian names for each and every town and feature. We had to go chase down an authoritative source of Albanian place names, which had never really existed. The Kosovars did a reasonably good job of tracking them down. But then we had to make a basic reference map, and I couldn’t include as many towns as I wanted to because I couldn’t fit all the labels.

    • Wired: What kinds of information do you use when you’re working on a border dispute?

      Dillon: "It’s mostly whatever commercial satellite imagery we have available. Honestly, these days it’s a lot of good old Google Earth. We prefer commercial because it’s neutral. But we also use terrain data from SRTM [the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission] or LIDAR or whatever else we need.

    • A propos de la frontière Kosovo-Macédine

      My colleague went to the capitals of both Kosovo and Macedonia. Their borders weren’t all that properly defined, and they needed to normalize their borders to have proper diplomatic relations. But they were very mistrustful of each other. He showed up with some Google Earth and Landsat images and showed them that there was this ridge line. He showed them that it’s not a big deal, you might have to give up an acre here or there, but if you just follow the ridge line that’s where the boundary should be. And they agreed. So it was a kind of technical solution to a politically charged situation. It worked out very quickly.

    • A propos de l’Irak et de la zone kurde... Un témoignage qui montre que les choix territoriaux reposent parfois sur n’importe quoi :

      During the Iraq war, our embassy staff were trying to negotiate with the Kurds in the north, and the Kurds were saying these lands used to belong to us, and our folks there had no way of knowing if that was true.

      I got tasked with finding old maps that would corroborate what these guys are saying. So I went to the Library of Congress and found old maps of the area. I was able georectify them and put them up against Kurds’ claims, and that was used as a negotiating tool.

      Our folks were able to say look, you said this whole area used to be in this particular province, but you can see here that only half of it was. And they’d say, “Oh yeah, maybe you’re right.”

    • Wired: Do you work with a lot of classified maps?

      Dillon: “Most classified maps we deal with are something that’s going on at a given time. They show the movement of rebel groups or narcotics or something like that. But they’re ephemeral. I don’t like to make them because why make a map that only a small number of people will see and is only useful for a short time?”

    • Wired: Have open access cartography tools like Open Street Maps impacted your work?

      Dillon: “In a way, yes. Not so much with boundaries because boundaries are legal instruments. Anybody can put down a boundary in OSM but nobody’s going to pay attention to it because there’s nothing backing it up. But in the realm of names, definitely so. People are putting down names in OSM that are quasi-official or not official or local, and those are very interesting. We look at them and we collect them.

      Before the internet, we had a much easier time defending the names we used because we were considered much more of an authority.

      Now, if you want to find out how to spell a town in an Arabic country, if you go to Wikipedia you may find a name that’s more commonly used on the ground. It’s something we’re having a hard time keeping up with.

      The democratization of cartography, much like the internet as a whole, has opened up the world of geographical knowledge to a much bigger degree.