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Mapping a World We Have Lost
Our way of moving through space determine the nature of our maps, and in a globalized world, it is both focussing and challenging to think about old ways of occupying and moving through or across...
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Java La Grande
The map “Java La Grande,” an imagined continent that invited close inspection from viewers, gives new meaning to the map being the territory. The territory never existed, but as it was mapped, the...
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Aquifers/Monocrops
Recent news of the quite devastating dwindling of the High Plains aquifers sent me back to how William Rankin charted the uneven distribution of monocrops in the United States. For the authority with...
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Imploding Maps or the Artifice of Cinematic Apocalypse
It hardly is a coincidence that the narratives of many disaster films parallel less of a storyline than what might be described as an imploding map: the destruction of familiar landmarks, the upending...
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On Mapping Aggregates and Google Maps
A powerful tradition of critical cartography unites a variety of selectively sourced metadata in a single frame of reference that transforms our own knowledge of space: their continuity and coherence...
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Drawing Hypotheses on a Newly Mapped World
At the same time as maps offer guides to spatially orient their readers, they collect a record of known space for viewers to occupy, collecting and displaying relationships that allow viewers to draw...
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The Lexical Landscape: Islands and Divides
With lines of civic dissent and division dominantly drawn in our media, it’s refreshing that the statistician Joshua Katz took measurements of usage to map more chromatic variations across the national...
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Re-Writing Mapped Space: Maps as Texts
The Atlas of True Names (2008) promises a legible cartographic surface clarifying confusions–although this enterprise is, in fact, less of a rebuttal to the deceptions of maps than based on whimsical...
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The World in Oakland
The black and white marquee of De Lauer’s Super News Stand seems a time-capsule of an earlier sense of Oakland as news entrepot, and of an era when newsprint provided a primary sense of immediate...
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Cartograms as Tools to Map an Over-Inhabited World
Terrestrial mapping has long focussed on the inhabited world and its limits. If medieval maps testified to the variety of place and distribution of human populations over climates and within torrid...
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Assembling Globes from Plastic Bricks: the Medium is the Message
If the medium is the message, what happens when the medium is Lego? The expressive value of all maps reflect their material media, from printed single-line engravings to digital images. But plastic...
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Chief Justice Roberts Mismaps Voting Rights
When Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. wrote the majority opinion to release nine states based in the South from federal oversight of voting procures and practices, he objected to the use of maps to...
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Mapping Reactions to Gay Marriage World-Wide and at Home
The ecumene as the world inhabited by legally recognized same-sex unions puts into context the recent reversal of DOMA in the United States: we seem more than a bit retardaire in our legal codes in...
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The Will to Map
Navigating the necklace of highways that hug the Santa Cruz Mountains beyond San Jose with a GPS map, you become both disoriented from the panorama before your eyes and quickly aware of the token...
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The Recent Resurgence of Manually Made Maps
A celebratory survey of the recent rage for manually-designed maps affords a veritable visual smorgasbord of aesthetic pleasure and graphic design. It is interesting and tempting to compare them to...
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Oakland Represented Variously: What We See When We Map Oakland’s Inhabitants
How to map the inhabitants of Oakland, CA, given the considerable diversity across neighborhoods? Does it exist as a unified social space, or what image of the city emerges? The sprawling city...
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Mapping License Plates/Maps in License Plates
How to explain the newfound popularity adopting landscapes on automotive license plates? States have long been counted by bored kids on interstates attempting to locate the full fifty for diversion,...
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Mapping the New World from France: Savages, Vegetables, Animals, Pelts
Cartographers are notoriously absent from their maps. This is nowhere more apparent than the received image that glorifies Samuel de Champlain-shipmaster, sailor and the cartographer who mapped the...
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Re-Writing Mapped Space: Maps as Texts
The Atlas of True Names (2008) promises a legible cartographic surface clarifying confusions–although this enterprise is, in fact, less of a rebuttal to the deceptions of maps than based on whimsical...
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Mapping Land and Sea in Venice, circa 1500
When Mercator in 1579 described his map as a synthesis of geographical maps and nautical charts, he created not only a new format of projection, but tried, for perhaps the first time, to reconcile the...
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