Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationDuring the last third of the twentieth century, the history of cartography caught the interest of more than a few historians who would have otherwise viewed maps as interesting, but not entirely essential to the focus of their chosen research. Since the pioneering work of J. B. Harley, David Woodward, and others, it has become more apparent that a closer inspection of the nature of maps, and cartography's part in any historical narrative, will offer information that the historian might otherwise overlook. This is especially true regarding the role that cartography plays in building and sustaining early modern empires. This dissertation explores and defines the elements of the cartographical representations in the North American imperial experience from its early colonial period to the middle of the nineteenth century. The work proceeds chronologically from the early English, French, Dutch, and Spanish territorial claims and acquisitions, to the United States' expansion of its continental holdings at the close of the Mexican War

The Mercator Projection: its uses, misuses, and its association with scientific information and the rise of scientific societies

This study examines the uses and misuses of the Mercator Projection for the past 400 years. In 1569, Dutch cartographer Gerard Mercator published a projection that revolutionized maritime navigation. The Mercator Projection is a rectangular projection with great areal exaggeration, particularly of areas beyond 50 degrees north or south, and is ill-suited for displaying most reference and thematic world maps. The current literature notes the significance of Gerard Mercator, the Mercator Projection, the general failings of the projection, and the twentieth century controversies that arose as a consequence of its misuse. This dissertation illustrates the path of the institutionalization of the Mercator Projection in western cartography and the roles played by navigators, scientific societies and agencies, and by the producers of popular reference and thematic maps and atlases. The data are pulled from the publication record of world maps and world maps in atlases for content analysis. The maps ranged in date from 1569 to 1900 and displayed global or near global coverage. The results revealed that the misuses of the Mercator Projection began after 1700, when it was connected to scientists working with navigators and the creation of thematic cartography. During the eighteenth century, the Mercator Projection was published in journals and reports for geographic societies that detailed state-sponsored explorations. In the nineteenth century, the influence of well-known scientists using the Mercator Projection filtered into the publications for the general public. This dissertation offers a glimpse into the complexities of mapping, the choice of map projection and why the Mercator Projection changed human’s ability of moving from one place to another, or, their perception of spatial arrangement of the globe

Cartographic Efficacy: Histories of the Present, Participatory Futures

Throughout history, maps have held a particularly potent ability to inform and persuade their users. Recognizing the power maps and their modes of productions possess, participatory mapping has been celebrated for its capacity to empower systemically disenfranchised communities by way of establishing inclusive pathways for influencing collection and representation of spatial information. What has remained largely periphery to considerations of participatory mapping, however, has been discussions of map design. Decades of scholarship in both traditional and critical veins of cartography, however, argue that it’s the careful execution of design choices that grant the map its power. Without attention to design, cartographers warn, the map will not be able to successfully communicate its intended message. However, even with little direct discussion of map design being reported, participatory mapping has a proven track record in an expansive range of locations and contexts of successfully supporting communities in advocating for their rights. As such, this dissertation takes up this disciplinary dissonance to explore what, ultimately, makes a map effective. Through content analysis of cartographic education materials, interviews with leaders of participatory mapping projects, and participant observation at national and international professional gatherings for cartographers, this research reveals an underlying tension between what informs the established understandings of effectiveness and how that effectiveness is achieved. Such tension can result in instances of disciplinary shaming and gatekeeping which, in turn, limit exchange of information and consequently prevented an evolution of the understandings of effectiveness. This dissertation calls for an expansion of the discipline’s framework of cartographic efficacy. I ultimately invite cartographers to allocate resources for understanding forms of efficacy that expand beyond traditional modalities in addition to making space for those who are not professionally trained cartographers to assert their ability to make effective maps and explore design principles with aplomb

(Re)Placing America: Cold War Mapping and the Mediation of International Space

The United States emerged from World War II as an undeniably global power, and as the Cold War unfolded, America faced decisions about where to place and display its power on the globe. The Cold War was a battle between two ideologies and competing world systems, both of which were vying for space and had the tools and technologies to control those spaces. Maps became a central vehicle for the testing of these new boundaries. Mapping projects and programs emerged from a variety of popular cartographers, foreign policy strategists, defense leaders, Congressional representatives, scientists, oppositional movements, labor unions, educational publishers, even everyday citizens. As each of these sources confirms, the scope of American commitments had expanded considerably; to account for this expansion, a cartographic impulse underwrote the continually evolving Cold War, and the tensions of art and science, realism and idealism, and space and place inherent in this impulse helped form the fault lines of the conflict. (Re)Placing America looks largely at the ways that cartography adapted to such changes and tensions in the second half of the twentieth century, and how the United States marshaled the practice of mapping in a variety of ways to account for the shift to internationalism. This dissertation explores how cartography mediated visions of space, and particularly, how it defined America's place within those spaces. Treating cartography as a complex rhetorical process of production, display, and circulation, the five chapters cover major geopolitical thematics, and the responding evolution of maps, from World War II until the Cold War's end in the early 1990s. Some of these driving themes include the "air-age" expansion of visual perspectives and strategic potential in journalistic maps; the appropriation of cartography as a medium for intelligence and national security objectives; the marshaling of maps as evidential weapons against the Soviet Union in diplomatic exchanges, Congressional reports, and government-sponsored propaganda; the shifts from East/West antagonisms to North/South ones as cartography was drafted into the modernization efforts of the U.S. in mapping the Third World; and the Defense Department's use of maps to argue for nuclear deterrence, while protest groups made radical cartographic challenges to these practices of state power. (Re)Placing America reads closely the maps of the forty-years-plus conflict and considers the complexity of their internal codes (in colors, shapes, icons, etc.), while also reaching out externally to the intersecting interests and visions of the cartographic producers and the Cold War contexts in which they emerged. The project seeks out and explores particular nodal points and thematics where maps consolidated and shaped changing shifts in perception, where cartographic fragments cohered around the defining moments, but also sometimes in the everyday politics of the Cold War. Ultimately, this project offers four conclusions about and conduct and operation of American mapping during the complex, ideologically charged time of the Cold War. First, the function of the map to both "fix" and "unfix" particular perceptions of the world is relevant to assessing how America sought to stabilize its place in a rapidly changing world. Second, the internationalism of the Cold War was bound up in the capacities for cartography to document and adapt to it. Third, the humanistic notion of a geographical imagination is central to understanding why particular Cold War agents and institutions continually drew on cartography to represent their interests. Finally, combining an ideological approach to reading maps as articulators of contextual tensions and historical ideas with an instrumental approach to maps as material, strategic documents can best help to situate cartography as an ongoing process of production, circulation, and display

Annual Report, 2011

Program Director: Tom Paradise, 2005-2009; Joel Gordon, 2009

Future directions for scientific advice in Europe

Across Europe, scientific evidence and advice is in great demand, to inform policies and decision making on issues such as climate change, new technologies and environmental regulation. But the diversity of political cultures and attitudes to expertise in different European countries can make the task of designing EU-wide advisory institutions and processes both sensitive and complex. In January 2015, President Juncker asked Commissioner Moedas to report on options for improving scientific advice within the European Commission. At a time when these issues are higher than usual on the political agenda, it is important that the case for scientific advice and evidence-informed policy is articulated and analysed afresh. To support these efforts, this collection brings together agenda-setting essays by policymakers, practitioners, scientists and scholars from across Europe. Authors include Anne Glover, Ulrike Felt, Robert Madelin, Andy Stirling, Vladimír Šucha and Jos van der Meer. Their contributions outline various challenges but also constructive ways forward for scientific advice in Europe

Volume 63-3 Complete Issue

The complete issue of Volume 63, Issue 3, originally uploaded to Gamma Theta Upsilon Novemeber 202

The Functions of Portolan Maps: An evaluation of the utility of manuscript nautical cartography from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries

In the thirteenth century, following the expansion of seafaring city-states and kingdoms in the Mediterranean, a new form of cartography emerged, known as portolan charts. These maps, more secular and scientific than earlier cartographic genres, were produced between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, primarily in the western Mediterranean. While portolan charts and atlases have been studied since the nineteenth century, they remain enigmatic. One of the most important questions about them has been: ‘what was their function’? Most scholars have argued that they were fundamentally utilitarian maps, used for navigation. This thesis challenges that theory, and proposes that portolan maps were not navigational. To critically assess the function of portolan maps, the first chapter evaluates their methods of construction, as determined through an analysis of primary sources, and an original archaeological reconstruction of a portolan chart. The second chapter presents seven case studies of charts, atlases, and their makers, to explore the cartographers’ output, the specific functions of their maps, and how they relate to the genre as a whole. The third chapter analyses the contemporary documentary and literary evidence to gain a better understanding of the economic market for portolan maps. The fourth chapter evaluates their functions, in two parts: the first discusses how the maps could have been used on ships, how they changed over time, and investigates the practical utility of their toponymy and hydrography. The second part explores their alternative functions, which were as administrative and encyclopaedic maps, spiritual and scholarly maps, and aesthetic objets d’art. Although some evidence suggests portolan maps were used at sea, it is largely circumstantial and unspecific. The evaluation of their construction, specific functions, the output of cartographers, and their practical utility, instead indicates that portolan maps were not navigationally useful, but embodied number of other purposes