'...a Professor explains how his country's cartographers experimented with ever larger maps until they finally made one with a scale of a mile to a mile. 'It has never been spread out, yet', he says. 'The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself, as its own maps, and I assure you it does nearly as well.' Lewis Carroll.

'... In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single Province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.....' Borges.


Two general characteristics of maps emerge from the above quotes. First, maps are selective : they do not, and cannot, display all there is to know about any given piece of the environment. Secondly, if they are to be maps at all they must directly represent at least some aspect of the landscape.

We may divide the types of representation in maps into two different types: iconic representation (which attempts to directly portray certain visual aspects of the piece of territory in question) and symbolic representation (which utilises purely conventional signs and symbols, like letters, numbers or graphic devices).


A map is selective. In other words, the mapmaker determines what is , and more importantly, what is not included in the representation. This is the first important sense in which maps are conventional . Another obvious way in which maps are conventional is in their use of 'projection'. No curved space like that of the Earth can be projected in two dimensions without some distortion. Over the years many different modes of projection have been developed: some are better for conveying such elements as shape or size, some, for compass direction or relative position. No one projection is the best or the most accurate. A particular convention is selected by the mapmaker on the basis of functional and perhaps aesthetic criteria, or because of a specification or convention.



What, then, is the relationship of our representations of the world to that world?.. Rather than accept a split between the world and our experience of it... our experience of the world and our representations of it are mutually interdependent, so there is a sense in which the two are inseparable. Or, to put it in its most contentious form, 'the map is the territory'.

Maps and Pictures. Many pictures are presumably representations of a particular subject or part of the landscape from a particular point of view. the point of view is taken as having at least some significance and may indeed be the dominant aspect of the picture. Whereas maps, though they have a point of view in the sense that they are representations of parts of the landscape, deny or suppress that point of view... it is not just that maps do have a perspective, or that the perspective is taken for granted, it is rather that the disengagement hides the privileging of a particular conceptual scheme. Maps, in this sense, are pictures. .... maps, to be capable of transmitting information, have to be intersubjective.


no map, representation or theory can be independent of a form of life.


It was not until the early 1400s that Ptloemy's Geographica arrived in Europe, the same period in which Brunelleschi developed perspective geometry and its application to architecture... Ptolemy's metrication meant that all points were commensurable: that is, distances and directions could be established between one place and any other. Further, unknown places could be given co-ordinates. It was the synthesis of perspective geometry and Ptolemy's work that enabled the imposition of a grid on the known world. Once that grid was imposed, the mathematician Toscanelli was able to argue plausibly that sailing westwards across the Atlantic was a shorter voyage to the Spice Islands than the traditional route...

The significance of Ptloemy's Geographica was not just its use of a grid: it was also an atlas which enabled the co-ordination of maps of individual lands into one map of the world.





a maps non -cartographic properties include:



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