> Until the middle of the 20th Century, cartography was more an art than a science.
Strange perspective, accurate nautical charts were critical infrastructure in the age of sail, making them and using them was a very technical endeavor backed by significant financing. The brightest scientists of the period spent a lot energy on the longitude problem and similar navigation bottlenecks. Accurate land maps were also important for military and state finance purposes. Much of early mathematics and astronomy were focused on measuring the Earth and pinpointing your location.
I’m not sure if map-making was a science explicitly, there was no UX academia like there is now, but it was certainly a serious engineering field rather than an “art”, and dismissing that rich history of know-how seems like a poor foundation for a review of map-making theory.
I'm guessing the authors here are referring to the fact that many places were really poorly drawn. There was high detail in regions where the map makers were local to but this got fuzzy real fast. Some would even do things like plant fake cities on their map as a means of fraud detection. A secret signature if you will. Someone who copied their map was likely to copy the fake place.
You're definitely right that this has a lot to do with early mathematics but remember that that is a small part of map making. How do you define coast lines? Rivers? Borders? The devil is in the details. With older maps the general shapes would be (usually) accurate but it could get fuzzy around the edges. Literally. It's not like they could get a picture from space, or even from the sky. It would take years to measure many things that would take us minutes now
Cartography is strongly opinionated. The dirty secret, which I don’t think most people realize, is that there is no correct, reproducible source upon which to base the creation of a map. Every frame of reference is known to be wrong in material ways, so maps are a bit of a polite fiction that work well if you don’t look at them too closely. Maps are more suggestions than truth even in the best of cases.
Maps are still useful but as the old saying goes, maps are not the territory. Physics puts a practical bound on how closely a map can represent the territory that in modern contexts turns out to be important.
True, but that’s not so much a dirty secret as something cartographers will loudly and endlessly tell anyone who’ll listen within moments of meeting them
Parts of theoretical cartography are model example how Information Theory Bandwagon [1] works:
'By the mid-1970s any historical account of the development of models of cartographic communication becomes unmanageable very largely because of their increasing popularity and the way in which authors making use of them learn and borrow ideas from one another. One commentator faced with the proliferation of these models is distressed by being 'awash in a sea of scientific-sounding terminology mostly pirated from other fields such as electrical engineering.' [2]
Title needs a (2001) I skimmed the paper looking for new insight only to see it talk about stuff that's already prevalent.
QGIS, FME, D3, Open layers, Mapbox, and others GIS related tools has been prevalent in all the workplaces I've worked at that needed something related to this topic.
What is the interest in this article from 2001? There is a rich GIS and visualization history that has happened since then … if you really want to see something radical look at Wild Bill Bunge’s work
> Until the middle of the 20th Century, cartography was more an art than a science.
Strange perspective, accurate nautical charts were critical infrastructure in the age of sail, making them and using them was a very technical endeavor backed by significant financing. The brightest scientists of the period spent a lot energy on the longitude problem and similar navigation bottlenecks. Accurate land maps were also important for military and state finance purposes. Much of early mathematics and astronomy were focused on measuring the Earth and pinpointing your location.
I’m not sure if map-making was a science explicitly, there was no UX academia like there is now, but it was certainly a serious engineering field rather than an “art”, and dismissing that rich history of know-how seems like a poor foundation for a review of map-making theory.
I'm guessing the authors here are referring to the fact that many places were really poorly drawn. There was high detail in regions where the map makers were local to but this got fuzzy real fast. Some would even do things like plant fake cities on their map as a means of fraud detection. A secret signature if you will. Someone who copied their map was likely to copy the fake place.
You're definitely right that this has a lot to do with early mathematics but remember that that is a small part of map making. How do you define coast lines? Rivers? Borders? The devil is in the details. With older maps the general shapes would be (usually) accurate but it could get fuzzy around the edges. Literally. It's not like they could get a picture from space, or even from the sky. It would take years to measure many things that would take us minutes now
Those of us who hunt for connections between cartography & cryptography are sometimes confronted with direct identifications of the 2:
https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/02/24/money...
(Only half-serious; dont dvote me!)
Cartography is strongly opinionated. The dirty secret, which I don’t think most people realize, is that there is no correct, reproducible source upon which to base the creation of a map. Every frame of reference is known to be wrong in material ways, so maps are a bit of a polite fiction that work well if you don’t look at them too closely. Maps are more suggestions than truth even in the best of cases.
Maps are still useful but as the old saying goes, maps are not the territory. Physics puts a practical bound on how closely a map can represent the territory that in modern contexts turns out to be important.
True, but that’s not so much a dirty secret as something cartographers will loudly and endlessly tell anyone who’ll listen within moments of meeting them
Parts of theoretical cartography are model example how Information Theory Bandwagon [1] works:
'By the mid-1970s any historical account of the development of models of cartographic communication becomes unmanageable very largely because of their increasing popularity and the way in which authors making use of them learn and borrow ideas from one another. One commentator faced with the proliferation of these models is distressed by being 'awash in a sea of scientific-sounding terminology mostly pirated from other fields such as electrical engineering.' [2]
[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774 [2] Christopher Board, "Cartographic Communication", Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 1981
Title needs a (2001) I skimmed the paper looking for new insight only to see it talk about stuff that's already prevalent.
QGIS, FME, D3, Open layers, Mapbox, and others GIS related tools has been prevalent in all the workplaces I've worked at that needed something related to this topic.
What is the interest in this article from 2001? There is a rich GIS and visualization history that has happened since then … if you really want to see something radical look at Wild Bill Bunge’s work