person:william rankin

  • After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century, Rankin
    http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo22655244.html

    For most of the twentieth century, maps were indispensable. They were how governments understood, managed, and defended their territory, and during the two world wars they were produced by the hundreds of millions. Cartographers and journalists predicted the dawning of a “map-minded age,” where increasingly state-of-the-art maps would become everyday tools. By the century’s end, however, there had been decisive shift in mapping practices, as the dominant methods of land surveying and print publication were increasingly displaced by electronic navigation systems.

    In After the Map, William Rankin argues that although this shift did not render traditional maps obsolete, it did radically change our experience of geographic knowledge, from the God’s-eye view of the map to the embedded subjectivity of GPS. Likewise, older concerns with geographic truth and objectivity have been upstaged by a new emphasis on simplicity, reliability, and convenience. After the Map shows how this change in geographic perspective is ultimately a transformation of the nature of territory, both social and political.

    Introduction Territory and the Mapping Sciences

    Part I The International Map of the World and the Logic of Representation

    Chapter 1 The Authority of Representation
    A Single Map for All Countries, 1891–1939

    Chapter 2 Maps as Tools
    Globalism, Regionalism, and the Erosion of Universal Cartography, 1940–1965

    Part II: Cartographic Grids and New Territories of Calculation

    Chapter 3 Aiming Guns, Recording Land, and Stitching Map to Territory
    The Invention of Cartographic Grid Systems, 1914–1939

    Chapter 4 Territoriality without Borders
    Global Grids and the Universal Transverse Mercator, 1940–1965

    Part III: Electronic Navigation and Territorial Pointillism

    Chapter 5 Inhabiting the Grid
    Radionavigation and Electronic Coordinates, 1920–1965

    Chapter 6 The Politics of Global Coverage
    The Navy, NASA, and GPS, 1960–2010

    Conclusion The Politics in My Pocket

    #cartographie #sémiologie #bibliographie #cartoexperiment #livre #after_the_map