January 26, 2010
The AAG has posted the preliminary program for this year’s meetings. Our sessions are on the Saturday.
This year papers go for 5 days, so Saturday might be OK (usually they are sparsely attended) but if you have a schedule conflict please let myself or Stuart know as soon as possible as the program can still be changed (they say).
January 21, 2010
The LA Times has been working on a fascinating neighborhood project that will be of interest to people who read this blog. They call it simply “Mapping LA.”
The project is interesting for a number of reasons, but one that attracts the attention is that they explicitly consider what it means to draw boundaries around neighborhoods and thereby create a sense of identity, a sense of place.
Another innovative aspect is that they continue to solicit comments from people about these neighborhoods, so that they are characterized by those who live there. This led them to change and modify their original maps.
Lastly, they also make the data available under a Creative Commons license.
Imagine if this was available for your city. What could be done with it?
January 19, 2010
Muki Haklay has an interesting post about the state of play regarding VGI (volunteered geographic information) in Haiti and possible conflicts between OpenStreetMap and Google.
Here is a comparison map of coverage, where “yellow means that there is a better coverage in Map Maker, and blue means that there is a better coverage in OpenStreetMap. The difference between the two datasets is expressed in metres.”
Muki says:
there are differences between the two sources of data, and these may matter as the relief work is carried out. The evaluation question is: for each grid square, which of the datasets contains more information in terms of roads length?
December 3, 2009
A story in today’s (UK) Guardian documents the uneven geography of knowledge written into Wikipedia and maps it out:
From the article:
There are some countries that are crammed with a dense amount of floating virtual information, such as Germany (with an average of one article tagged for every 65 square km), while others remain as virtual deserts, such as Chad (with an average of one tagged article every 17,000 square km).
Sharp divides between the Global North and the Global South can likewise be seen when looking at the number of geotagged articles per person. Austria, Iceland and Switzerland all have around one geotagged article for every 1,000 people, while in China or Guinea there is just over one article for every 500,000 people.
Africa is still the “dark continent” and the map overall shows a distinct Euro-American focus (although it might be better to normalize this by number of people as the text of the article does; see above quote).
If we grant that technologies produce space, then even very powerful, virtual and “complete” technologies such as Wikipedia are still reproducing existing material relations (Matthew Zook has done excellent work on this).
November 22, 2009
My final report for Progress in Human Geography has been submitted. If it is accepted it should appear next year online.
These reports have been a lot of work but at the same time intellectually challenging and I hope useful. Following Mark Monmonier as I did I wanted to switch the focus on to issues that are important but perhaps less well investigated (maybe whoever follows me will want to switch to something else). In my case this was a series of concerns around the politics of mapping.
Here are the first and second reports.
The third report is relevant to this blog as it covers calculation and territory. Here is the opening paragraph.
Two themes dominate this year’s report: calculation and territory. Both of these are larger issues than cartography itself, but cartography has been increasingly drawn into their ambit such that we might tentatively identify cartographic calculations of territory. Ranging across a wide set of problems including colonial, political and racial mappings, not to mention indigeneity and philosophical concerns of ontology; calculation and territory mark out a wide swath of cartographically informed work. This is not to foreclose other inflections of this phrase such as “calculative cartographies of territory” to center around the productive role of mapping, or possibly “territorial cartographies of calculation” to highlight how calculation employs mapping. All of these are possible avenues into the complex relationships between mapping, calculation and territory.
November 2, 2009
| Title: | Territory and Cartography: Politics, History, Techniques III | ||||||||
| Description: | The relation between cartography and territory seems well-known. State territories are one of the key objects of cartographic work, both in terms of their depiction on geopolitical maps and in terms of the state agencies that produce maps of their territory. Here we want to reverse the question: to what extent is cartography productive of territory? If territory can be understood as a political technology, comprising a range of techniques for the measurement of land and the control of terrain, then cartography, alongside land surveying and the military, is one of those techniques; part of what might be conceived of as state territorial strategies.
These three sessions aim to bring together papers analysing maps politically in terms of their relation to the state and its territory, drawing on a range of historical and geographical contexts. The principle question is: if we know that the map is not the territory, to what extent is it still productive of it? This third session includes papers that consider the politics of territory and cartography. |
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November 2, 2009
| Title: | Territory and Cartography: Politics, History, Techniques II | ||||||||||
| Description: | Territory and Cartography: Politics, History, Techniques
The relation between cartography and territory seems well-known. State territories are one of the key objects of cartographic work, both in terms of their depiction on geopolitical maps and in terms of the state agencies that produce maps of their territory. Here we want to reverse the question: to what extent is cartography productive of territory? If territory can be understood as a political technology, comprising a range of techniques for the measurement of land and the control of terrain, then cartography, alongside land surveying and the military, is one of those techniques; part of what might be conceived of as state territorial strategies. These three sessions aim to bring together papers analysing maps politically in terms of their relation to the state and its territory, drawing on a range of historical and geographical contexts. The principle question is: if we know that the map is not the territory, to what extent is it still productive of it? This second session deals with historical issues of territory. |
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| Sponsorships: | Cartography Specialty Group Historical Geography Specialty Group Political Geography Specialty Group |
November 2, 2009
| Territory and Cartography: Politics, History, Techniques I | |||||||||||||||
| Description: | Territory and Cartography: Politics, History, Techniques
The relation between cartography and territory seems well-known. State territories are one of the key objects of cartographic work, both in terms of their depiction on geopolitical maps and in terms of the state agencies that produce maps of their territory. Here we want to reverse the question: to what extent is cartography productive of territory? If territory can be understood as a political technology, comprising a range of techniques for the measurement of land and the control of terrain, then cartography, alongside land surveying and the military, is one of those techniques; part of what might be conceived of as state territorial strategies. These three sessions aim to bring together papers analysing maps politically in terms of their relation to the state and its territory, drawing on a range of historical and geographical contexts. The principle question is: if we know that the map is not the territory, to what extent is it still productive of it? This first session is introduced by the organisers, then moves to some conceptual papers before finally considering ways that territory is volumetric. |
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| Sponsorships: | Cartography Specialty Group Political Geography Specialty Group Historical Geography Specialty Group |
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October 11, 2009
This is a group blog on the territory and cartography AAG sessions. And possibly for further discussion/workshop/publications.
AAG 2010 participants:
1. Jeremy Crampton
2. Stuart Elden
3. Mona Domosh (Dartmouth) – Corporate cartographies and the making of an American empire
4. Mark Monmonier (Syracuse) – Aeronautical Charting and the Production, Reproduction, and Regulation of Airspace by the United States.
5. Richard Powell (Liverpool) – What is submarine territory? Extending the sovereign rights of the Danish kingdom.
6. Nisha Shah (Brown) – Metaphors, man and maps: the cartographic production of ‘territory’ as a normative principle
7. Catherine Dunlop (Yale) – Borderland Cartography from Below: The Role of Civil Society in Mapping Alsace-Lorraine, 1860-1918
8. Scott Kirsch (North Carolina) – The invention of territory
9. Jeppe Strandsbjerg (Copenhagen Business School) – Cartographic territories and the division of unknown space
10. Elena dell’Agnese (Milano-Bicocca) – ‘Manifest Cartography’: US territorial expansion, textbooks and the logo-mapping of the Western hemisphere
11. John Hessler (Library of Congress) – Political and Economic Foundations of Ancient Cartography: Roman law and Epigraphy, 100 BC-300 AD
12. Martin Pratt (IBRU) – Cartography and International Boundary Arbitration
13. Mike Heffernan -
14. Nessa Cronin (National University of Ireland, Galway) – The Jurisdiction of the Map: Official and unofficial productions of imperial space in the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, 1824-46.
