Initiative très intéressante, à suivre pour notre bouquin sur la carto radicale.
In the past few months I’ve agreed to develop a course called “A Critical History of Cartography” for our department’s new Masters and Certificate in Digital Mapping. This initiative, which we call New Maps Plus, will offer interested students the ability to earn a Certificate or a Masters of Science from the University of Kentucky in subjects covering digital mapping, GIS, the geoweb, and programming for online maps.
One of the things I proposed for this course was to develop a Reader in Critical Cartography, which would collect in one place, with short commentary, the people, events, maps and theory that had a profound influence on the way we think about maps, or conversely, the way maps may have made us see the world in new ways. This book would then be the assigned reading for the course but would also I hope be of interest to a wider readership.
To that end I’ve developed (with my colleague Matt Zook) the following initial schema for the book and the course. The latter is 10 weeks long so there are ten subject headings. The idea would be to pose the question of what it means to approach maps critically, with a view to looking historically to inform the present, a not uncommon technique I’ve used before.
There are a variety of ways of going about this. One would be to take maps (or people or events) that were radical at the time and recognized as such, even if only by those involved. So this would include the work of JB (Brian) Harley who wrote against the grain of cartographic received wisdom. This kind of work changed the way we understand mapping.
This could then be contrasted with what we now understand to be radical, or is often held up as radical. This could include the work of Marie Tharp (ocean floor mapping) or John Snow (cholera mapping of London). These maps “changed the world” as the Guardian puts it. But, they need our interpretive spin to recognize it as such, and thereby this falls within that category of books that are needed to understand what happened. There’s even a book with that title: the map that changed the world (about the first complete geology map).
