I said in the book that there is a copy of the “President’s Globe” at Univ. Georgia in Athens, Ga. The President’s globes were made for President Roosevelt by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII. They were 50″ globes, far bigger than normal, that Arthur Robinson and his Map Division in OSS had made. The full story is told here:

Robinson, A. H. (1997) The President’s Globe. Imago Mundi, 49, 143-152.

Robinson mentions that there are about 12 globes that were made (strictly speaking the OSS made the globe gores and a Chicago company made the physical globes). He mentions that UGA has one. Sure enough if you go to the Geography Department at UGA you see this in the lobby:

These two things are what led me to believe that this is a President’s Globe. I now think this is wrong though.

When he was doing his article Robinson must have asked around about big globes and been told there was one at UGA. But the one pictured at least is very different from Roosevelt’s as this image should demonstrate:

Roosevelt with his globe (from Robinson 1997).

The size is obviously all wrong. But not only that but compare the gores from the President’s Globe, here at the Library of Congress.

The map here is much more subtle and doesn’t have raised physiographic relief like the UGA one.

Here’s Africa from the President’s globe and the UGA one again:

So there you have it, just in case somebody wants to write to me about my mistake!

The Territorial Subcommittee of this secret group was Chaired by Bowman and met weekly from March 1942 through the end of 1943, at which time the State Dept. took more direct control. The official history of this group records the definitions of “territory” that they were using:

The term “territorial” was defined in two sense: first, as land with the people on it. As land, it signaled property, which must be delimited for tax purposes, administration of law, and national defense. Boundaries therefore could not be ignored. They still meant what they always had, only to a lesser degree. Aviation and other modern developments of a military and economic nature had modified the significance but not entirely removed either the security or the economic implications of boundaries. These boundaries afforded, in particular, a reduced but still strategically vital period of military warning.

Second, the word “territorial” was considered to mean the historical and present economic, social, and political forces and activities at work inside any area. The center of emphasis, accordingly, was the individual country and its people, but to understand its problems and conditions one had to see beyond it, always keeping in mind the historical forces at work in and around it. The deliberations of the subcommittee focused in this regard upon the requisite conditions for peace and stability both within and among countries.

I think you can see in these definitions both a typically 20th century take on territory as states or countries, but also an especially geographical-historical one where territories are put into a wider context and not just treated individually. Of course the definitions are problematic because for example who are the “people”? Here the subcommittee took an interesting almost critical epistemological approach:

The subcommittee’s initial question was: “What do we need to know” about the problems ahead?

They soon answered this by collecting data on the “population” in each area but it would be interesting to see them decide what they needed to know.

All quotes are from: US Dept. of State Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 1939-1945. Edited by Harley A. Notter, 1949.

http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plcdib/territory.html

There has been a real interest in the relation between political theory and territory recently, although what it tends to do is take territory as a relatively straight-forward notion, and then apply debates of justice to it. This was the case in some of the books recently appearing on this topic which I reviewed here. I fear this conference will be similar, though it is surely a good thing that political science and philosophy is thinking about such issues at all.

And a series of linked talks - http://www.bl.uk/magnificentmaps/events1.html

Then another exhbition at the Royal Geographical Society – http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/Exhibitions/Exhibition.htm

http://phg.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/0309132509358474v1

and

http://phg.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/0309132510362603v1

Please contact either of us if you can’t access the papers through your own libraries…

8:00 AM Author(s): *Jeremy Crampton – Georgia State University, *Stuart Elden – University of Durham
Abstract Title: Territory and Cartography: Setting the Agenda

8:20 AM Author(s): *Nisha Shah – Watson Institute, Brown University/CsGG, LSE
Abstract Title: Metaphors, man and maps: the cartographic production of ‘territory’ as a normative principle

8:40 AM Author(s): *Jouni Häkli – University of Tampere
Abstract Title: Archiving territory, mapping politics

9:00 AM Author(s): *Mark Monmonier – Syracuse University
Abstract Title: Aeronautical Charting and the Production, Reproduction, and Regulation of Airspace by the United States

9:20 AM Author(s): *Richard C. Powell – University of Liverpool
Abstract Title: What is submarine territory? Extending the sovereign rights of the Danish kingdom

10:00 AM Author(s): *Scott Kirsch – University of North Carolina
Abstract Title: The Invention of Territory

10:20 AM Author(s): *John Hessler, Fellow Royal Geographical Society – Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
Abstract Title: Economic Foundations of Roman Cartography: Bounded Rationality, Territory, and Epigraphy, 100 BC-300 AD

10:40 AM Author(s): *Michael Heffernan – University of Nottingham
Abstract Title: Maps and the City: Paris and the 18th Century Cartographic Imagination

11:00 AM Author(s): *Catherine Dunlop – Yale University
Abstract Title: Borderland Cartography from Below: The Role of Civil Society in Mapping Alsace-Lorraine, 1860-1918

11:20 AM Author(s): *Nessa Cronin, Dr – National University of Ireland, Galway
Abstract Title: The Jurisdiction of the Map: Official and unofficial productions of imperial space in the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, 1824-46

12:40 PM Author(s): *Martin Pratt – International Boundaries Research Unit, Department of Geography, Durham University, UK
Abstract Title: Unreliable Witnesses? Maps as Evidence in Boundary and Sovereignty Disputes

1:00 PM Author(s): *Helga Tawil-Souri, Ph.D. – New York University
Abstract Title: Virtually Mapping Palestinian Dis-/Re-Appearances

1:20 PM Author(s): *Mona Domosh – Dartmouth College
Abstract Title: Corporate cartographies and the making of an American empire

1:40 PM Author(s): *Elena Dell’Agnese – Università Di Milano-Bicocca
Abstract Title: “Manifest Cartography”: US territorial expansion, textbooks and the logo-mapping of the Western hemisphere

Opening comments to Territory and Cartography AAG Sessions

Territory and Cartography

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?

The call for the session came out of a discussion of our own work.

SE – working on a history of the concept of territory, and the contemporary relation between territory and sovereignty, especially under the ‘war on terror’ and the post-Cold War world more generally.

JC – recent book on Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS, and a series of Progress reports on cartography. The last of which is entitled ‘Cartographical Calculations of Territory’.

Our previous work together – AAG sessions from Philadelphia on ‘Space, Politics, Calculation’ that became a theme issue of Social and Cultural Geography, and a co-edited book on Foucault and Geography.

SE has made the claim that territory needs to be understood somewhat differently to the standard ways geography has tended to describe it: territory is a bounded space, under the control of a group; territory is an outcome of territoriality. But rather than come up with a fixed definition, the aim is to try to think the issues in understanding how it has been understood at different times and places.

Three propositions –

1. Territory must be approached as a topic in itself; rather than through territoriality. Indeed, it may well be the case that the notion of ‘territoriality’ with regard to humans can only be appropriately understood through a notion of territory.
2. That territory can only be understood as a ‘bounded space’ if we are prepared to take ‘boundaries’ and ‘space’ as terms worthy of investigation in their own right as a preliminary step.
3. That ‘land’ and ‘terrain’—as political-economic and political-strategic relations—are necessary but insufficient to grasp ‘territory’. ‘Territory’ must be approached in its political, historical, geographical and conceptual specificity.

An agenda for future work… mine, hopefully providing some conceptual tools that can used, supplemented, criticised and put to work by others broadening beyond a European focus, and taking a wide historical scope.

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.

Notion of territory as extension is an old one. The Old Testament (Genesis) narrates the story of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth (Gr. Ἰάφεθ, Iapheth), who after the flood had the world divided among them. Japheth had his territory extended (Gen. 9:27) at the expense of Ham, who was cursed for seeing his father’s nakedness, and in the Hebrew Japheth sounds like “extend.” Traditionally, Japheth’s territories were Europe, whereas Ham was allocated to Africa and his descendents were to be Japheth’s slaves. So already we see territory, population and politics intertwined. But also a notion of territory as extension.

In the Middle Ages, Noahian  (Noah’s) races appeared in the form of mappae mundi (maps of the world) known as “T in O” maps. These maps presented a view of territorial division as a fundamental understanding of the world.

In the 18^th and 19^th C., when writers came to be concerned about race as continent-wide populations, and with natural history more generally (Darwin but also new geological findings), maps also played a critical role by mapping populations into their separate, areally bounded territories. A whole array of map types (maps as technologies of government) were invented in the 19^th C. to calculate the (moral, criminal, etc.) health of the population.

By contrast, in the 20^th C. anthropologists have mapped human variation not by area, but as geographically graded “clines” (a word coined by the biologist Julian Huxley in 1938, the same year cartographers (J.K. Wright) invented the term choropleth map). From Gr. khora, only inadequately translated as “space.” And the National Geographic’s Genographic Project is mapping human genetic diversity globally.

Counter-mappings (“map or be mapped” as geographer Bernard Nietschmann called it) have been used in the last few decades as the power relations of mapping have become more recognized for purposes of resistance.

Argument is that maps appropriate territory in certain ways, as calculation. Both in discourse and materially. For example, GIScience has increasingly turned to predicate ontology (the world as objects with properties) because these are computationally tractable. But is human life best understood in this way? Materially too, cartographic calculations have real effects with how we regulate space, appropriate nature, deal with movements across space and into privileged spaces, and solve political disputes. Eg., Schengen, border solutions for Bosnia, Israeli settlements in Palestine based on cartographic evidence of occupation in antiquity, etc.

*  *  *

The aim of this session is 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.

We asked the contributors to do a couple of things. One was that we welcomed a focus on the techniques involved in the production of territory; the second was that the papers should principally speak to the question: if we know that the map is not the territory, to what extent is it still productive of it?

Over these three sessions we have papers which look at conceptual issues, aerial sovereignty, maritime territory and underwater – the three dimensional approach (what JC has called ‘the volumetric’);  from antiquity to the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries; Rome, Paris, Alsace-Lorraine, Ireland and Denmark to the Philippines and Palestine; the use of maps in legal disputes; American empire… a wide range of historical and geographical contexts. Theory, politics and history.

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).

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?

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?