November 19, 2014
DH101 7B: Mapping
Check-in about Monday
Lingering questions about Palladio
New Palladio features
Questions about Friday’s assignment?
Last week’s vocabulary!!!
Next assignment: Mockup of interface. We’ll go over that next week.
SLIDE 1.
Takeaways: Every map has a purpose and a point of view. Cartesian
coordinates, which define KML, embed a particular point of view, and they are
not the only ways of representing geography. Likewise, Google Earth is the
product of a particular set of technologies, and not an inevitable representation of
the world. Non-representational maps represent an interesting possibility for the
humanist.
SLIDE 2.
SLIDE 3.
“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the
entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied,
and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of
the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following
Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their
Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some
Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and
Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that
Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of
the Disciplines of Geography.”
What is Borges saying? What can this tell us about the desire to map?
When we map, we’re always holding two impulses in the balance: the desire for
completeness and the desire for legibility. A map can’t be useful if it’s truly
complete. Every map tells us not only about the land it surveys, but about our
own culture and intentions.
SLIDE 4.
SLIDE 5.
SLIDE 6.
SLIDE 7.
Cartesian coordinate system: “a coordinate system that specifies each point
uniquely in a plane by a pair of numerical coordinates” — a way to specify
location in three-dimensional space.
SLIDE 8.
Ptolemy, 90 AD – 168 AD, Greco-Roman writer of Alexandria: pioneered the
making of maps based on perspective projection (view from a finite distance)
and a system of coordinates for locating features. He assigned coordinates to all
the places and geographic features he knew, in a grid that spanned the globe.
(Ptolemy’s maps looks distorted because his data was inaccurate.)
SLIDE 9.
The sixteenth century in Europe saw a resurgence of interest in maps. Does
anyone know why?
(Efforts to control and divide land)
SLIDE 10.
Mercatur projection, 1527. Size of land masses are secondary to straight lines,
grid, mathematical precision. (Britain and Europe appear relatively large,
compared with the rest of the world.) Good for nautical purposes because it
helped sailors measure out the fastest route in straight lines.
SLIDE 11.
SLIDE 12.
Traditional Japanese maps are oriented around particular landmarks and more
accurately depict distances between particular features than the land as a whole.
SLIDE 13.
SLIDE 14.
Australian aboriginal “maps” demonstrate a belief that as ancestors moved
through space, they marked ownership of the landscape. In this map, the
crocodile is an ancestral being, and in order to understand the map’s features,
you have to be familiar with the land itself.
SLIDE 15.
SLIDE 16.
Why does McLafferty say that GIS has masculinist tendencies?
bird’s eye view, detached observer, remotely sense, not reflexive, severs
connection between research and subject, positivist
Positivism embedded in Cartesian coordinates: “space as fixed through
coordinates of latitude and longitude.” Privileges objectivity, denies subjective or
non-scientific ways of understanding space. Universalism over regional
knowledge.
Maps, like data visualizations, give the impression of truthfulness. Maps seem to
depict the way things are.
SLIDE 17.
But is this really how we experience space? In some ways it is, in some ways it
isn’t. What are some other ways we order space?
SLIDE 18.
Denis Wood, Everything Sings, Boylan Heights, Raleigh, NC.
Sidewalk graffiti
SLIDE 19.
Windchimes
SLIDE 20.
radio waves
SLIDE 21.
Barking dogs
SLIDE 22.
Overhead power lines
SLIDE 23.
Traffic signs
SLIDE 24.
Attempting to represent the conjunction of time and space is yet another
challenge for mapping. As you read in the piece by Ian Gregory, GIS data
models do not include a conception of time.
Travel Time Tube Map
SLIDE 25.