Put Yourself on the Map

Even in the time of Google Maps,to be a traveller is to know the importance of a good map.

Even in the time of Google Maps,to be a traveller is to know the importance of a good map. For those setting out to discover new realms,it is not just a navigational tool a good map is a primary guide,and it will reveal its value as much with the landmarks it demarcates for our attention,as with the bylanes and pointlessly distracting clutter of place-names it skillfully omits. A good map is,in effect,its makers creation that can actually carry us from place to place as a natural movement. For,it will lay out the arena before us in a way that is comprehensible,by striking a balance on scale and detail that reflects the cartographers perspective and creativity.

After all,as Jerry Brotton invites us to consider in his scholarly and lavishly illustrated History of the World in Twelve Maps,the only map that can ever completely represent the territory it depicts would be on the effectively redundant scale of 1:1. And,he marvels,what disorienting comedy that idea has produced,citing Mein Herr from Lewis Carrolls Sylvie and Bruno Concluded,who says a map has been made of the country,on the scale of a mile to the mile. But he notes,it has never been spread out,in deference to farmers fears that such an act would block the sun altogether. So we now use the country itself,as its own map,and I assure you it does nearly as well.

Mein Herrs country may,indeed and chillingly so,do as well as its own map. But on anything less than an 1:1 scale,Brotton shows,the accuracy of maps can be and has been fiercely contested. His focus is specifically on world maps,on maps of the world known and imagined by folks at various points in time. And given the expanse of this inquiry,from fleetingly prehistoric rock paintings to the technological and corporate underpinnings of Google Earth,he allows himself the opportunity to leaven the study with stories rich with cultural and political overtones in order to underline the need for us to be tutored on ways to interrogate maps beyond the obvious political contestations of territory that governments are so sensitive about.

Cartography,it transpires in Brottons telling,is simply not enough studied. There is,it seems,a dearth of literature by experts,and a multi-volume History of Cartography is a work in progress that is unlikely to be brought up to the present for years to come. Cartography, he says,remains a subject in need of a discipline,its study generally undertaken by scholars trained like myself in a variety of other fields,its future even more uncertain than the maps its seeks to interpret. In this age of super-specialisation,whod have known!

Along the way,while studying how the world has been mapped,beginning with Ptolemys Geography in the second century AD,he gives enough examples of the essentially fraught dynamic of a map: the viewer is positioned simultaneously inside and outside it.

That sense of being positioned outside the map was first depicted most dramatically in 1972 when astronauts on Apollo 17 took photographs of the earth from space,and it still reflects our evolving view of a shared humanity. In years to come,Brotton notes,that image played into and in turn shaped the prevailing political and environmental reflections on the fragility of a world that united all its inhabitants. It set the stage for the 11th map of the world that animates the book: the German historian and filmmaker Arno Peters projection later in the 1970s that rebutted the long dominant Mercators projection for its Europe-centric demarcation of landmass. Peters so-called equal area projection claimed to rectify matters by increasing the landmasses of the southern hemisphere. Experts alleged inaccuracies,but the political current of the time,with the demand that development gap between the West and the rest be narrowed,gave Peters projection an obvious currency.

Now,as Google maps the world,street by street,Brotton catches the new concerns being aired among them,those of privacy and those born of a digital divide. With Google Earth and street views,how much of our intimate environment will we be comfortable with to have on view online? And owing to considerations of commerce and convenience of data-gathering in richer parts that allows their environs to be more deeply mapped,how equal is this new dominant cartography of the world anyway?

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The next time you encounter a map,look again and roll out the questions.

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