After the Map

After the Map PDF Author: William Rankin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022633953X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
For most of the twentieth century, maps were indispensable. They were how governments understood, managed, and defended their territory, and during the two world wars they were produced by the hundreds of millions. Cartographers and journalists predicted the dawning of a “map-minded age,” where increasingly state-of-the-art maps would become everyday tools. By the century’s end, however, there had been decisive shift in mapping practices, as the dominant methods of land surveying and print publication were increasingly displaced by electronic navigation systems. In After the Map, William Rankin argues that although this shift did not render traditional maps obsolete, it did radically change our experience of geographic knowledge, from the God’s-eye view of the map to the embedded subjectivity of GPS. Likewise, older concerns with geographic truth and objectivity have been upstaged by a new emphasis on simplicity, reliability, and convenience. After the Map shows how this change in geographic perspective is ultimately a transformation of the nature of territory, both social and political.

After the Map

After the Map PDF Author: William Rankin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022633953X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
For most of the twentieth century, maps were indispensable. They were how governments understood, managed, and defended their territory, and during the two world wars they were produced by the hundreds of millions. Cartographers and journalists predicted the dawning of a “map-minded age,” where increasingly state-of-the-art maps would become everyday tools. By the century’s end, however, there had been decisive shift in mapping practices, as the dominant methods of land surveying and print publication were increasingly displaced by electronic navigation systems. In After the Map, William Rankin argues that although this shift did not render traditional maps obsolete, it did radically change our experience of geographic knowledge, from the God’s-eye view of the map to the embedded subjectivity of GPS. Likewise, older concerns with geographic truth and objectivity have been upstaged by a new emphasis on simplicity, reliability, and convenience. After the Map shows how this change in geographic perspective is ultimately a transformation of the nature of territory, both social and political.

After the Revolution

After the Revolution PDF Author: Robert Evans
Publisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849354634
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
What will the fracturing of the United States look like? After the Revolution is an edge-of-your-seat answer to that question. In the year 2070, twenty years after a civil war and societal collapse of the "old" United States, extremist militias battle in the crumbling Republic of Texas. As the violence spreads like wildfire and threatens the Free City of Austin, three unlikely allies will have to work together in an act of resistance to stop the advance of the forces of the white Christian ethnostate known as the "Heavenly Kingdom." Out three protagonists include Manny, a fixer that shuttles journalists in and out of war zones and provides footage for outside news agencies. Sasha is a teenage woman that joins the Heavenly Kingdom before she discovers the ugly truths behind their movement. Finally, we have Roland: A US Army vet kitted out with cyberware (including blood that heals major trauma wounds and a brain that can handle enough LSD to kill an elephant), tormented by broken memories, and 12,000 career kills under his belt. In the not-so-distant world Evans conjures we find advanced technology, a gender expansive culture, and a roving Burning Man-like city fueled by hedonistic excess. This powerful debut novel from Robert Evans is based on his investigative reporting from international conflict zones and on increasingly polarized domestic struggles. It is a vision of our very possible future.

After the Map

After the Map PDF Author: William Rankin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022633936X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Over the course of the twentieth century, there was a major shift in practices of mapping, as centuries-old methods of land surveying and print publication were incrementally displaced by electronic navigation systems. William Rankin argues that although this shift did not render traditional maps obsolete, it did revise the goals of the mapping sciences as a whole. Military cartographers and civilian agencies alike developed new techniques for tasks that exceeded the capabilities of paper, such as aiming long-range guns, navigating in featureless environments, regularizing air travel, or drilling for offshore oil. "After the Map "reveals the major conceptual ramifications of these and other changes and in doing so offers a new way of understanding the central political-geographic shift of the twentieth century. Seen first and foremost as affecting a transformation in the nature of "territory," the change from paper mapping to electronic systems is not a story about technological improvement or the wizardry of precision; instead, it is about the "kind" of geographic knowledge and therefore governance that can exist in the first place. "

The Secret Language of Maps

The Secret Language of Maps PDF Author: Carissa Carter
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 1984858017
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
A highly visual exploration of diagrams and data that helps you understand how "maps" are part of everyday thinking, how they tell stories, and how they can reframe your point of view, from Stanford University's world-renowned d.school. “This book is the ultimate legend to mapping all kinds of data.”—Jessica Hagy, Webby Award-winning blogger of Indexed and author of How to Be Interesting (In Ten Simple Steps) Maps aren’t just geographic, they are also infographic and include all types of frameworks and diagrams. Any figure that sorts data visually and presents it spatially is a map. Maps are ways of organizing information and figuring out what’s important. Even stories can be mapped! The Secret Language of Maps provides a simple framework to deconstruct existing maps and then shows you how to create your own. An embedded mystery story about a woman who investigates the disappearance of an old high school friend illustrates how to use different maps to make sense of all types of information. Colorful illustrations bring the story to life and demonstrate how the fictional character’s collection of data, properly organized and “mapped,” leads her to solve the mystery of her friend’s disappearance. You’ll learn how to gather data, organize it, and present it to an audience. You’ll also learn how to view the many maps that swirl around our daily lives with a critical eye, aware of the forces that are in play for every creator.

When Maps Become the World

When Maps Become the World PDF Author: Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022667486X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Map making and, ultimately, map thinking is ubiquitous across literature, cosmology, mathematics, psychology, and genetics. We partition, summarize, organize, and clarify our world via spatialized representations. Our maps and, more generally, our representations seduce and persuade; they build and destroy. They are the ultimate record of empires and of our evolving comprehension of our world. This book is about the promises and perils of map thinking. Maps are purpose-driven abstractions, discarding detail to highlight only particular features of a territory. By preserving certain features at the expense of others, they can be used to reinforce a privileged position. When Maps Become the World shows us how the scientific theories, models, and concepts we use to intervene in the world function as maps, and explores the consequences of this, both good and bad. We increasingly understand the world around us in terms of models, to the extent that we often take the models for reality. Winther explains how in time, our historical representations in science, in cartography, and in our stories about ourselves replace individual memories and become dominant social narratives—they become reality, and they can remake the world.

Mapping the Nation

Mapping the Nation PDF Author: Susan Schulten
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226740706
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
“A compelling read” that reveals how maps became informational tools charting everything from epidemics to slavery (Journal of American History). In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past. All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map. Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.

Mapping Decline

Mapping Decline PDF Author: Colin Gordon
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812291506
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form." Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy—and often sheer folly—of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history. Mapping Decline is the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps—rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records—illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.

Encounters in the New World

Encounters in the New World PDF Author: Mirela Altic
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022679119X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
Analyzing more than 150 historical maps, this book traces the Jesuits’ significant contributions to mapping and mapmaking from their arrival in the New World. In 1540, in the wake of the tumult brought on by the Protestant Reformation, Saint Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits. The Society’s goal was to revitalize the faith of Catholics and to evangelize to non-Catholics through charity, education, and missionary work. By the end of the century, Jesuit missionaries were sent all over the world, including to South America. In addition to performing missionary and humanitarian work, Jesuits also served as cartographers and explorers under the auspices of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French crowns as they ventured into remote areas to find and evangelize to native populations. In Encounters in the New World, Mirela Altic analyzes more than 150 of their maps, most of which have never previously been published. She traces the Jesuit contribution to mapping and mapmaking from their arrival in the New World into the post-suppression period, placing it in the context of their worldwide undertakings in the fields of science and art. Altic’s analysis also shows the incorporation of indigenous knowledge into the Jesuit maps, effectively making them an expression of cross-cultural communication—even as they were tools of colonial expansion. This ambiguity, she reveals, reflects the complex relationship between missions, knowledge, and empire. Far more than just a physical survey of unknown space, Jesuit mapping of the New World was in fact the most important link to enable an exchange of ideas and cultural concepts between the Old World and the New.

After the Siege

After the Siege PDF Author: Jacqueline Barbara Carr
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781555536299
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
During the late 1770s, Boston's townspeople were struggling to rebuild a community devastated by British occupation, the ensuing siege by the Continental Army, and the Revolutionary war years. After the British attacked Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, Boston's population plummeted from 15,000 civilians to less than 3,000, property was destroyed and plundered, and the economy was on the verge of collapse. How the once thriving colonial seaport and its demoralized inhabitants recovered in the wake of such demographic, physical, and economic ruin is the subject of this compelling and well-researched work. Drawing on extensive primary sources, including ward tax assessors' Taking Books, church records, census records, birth and marriage records, newspaper accounts, and town directories, Jacqueline Barbara Carr brings to life Boston's remarkable rebirth as a flourishing cosmopolitan city at the dawn of the nineteenth century. She examines this watershed period in the city's social and cultural history from the perspective of the town's ordinary men and women, both white and African American, re-creating the determined community of laborers, artisans, tradesmen, mechanics, and seamen who demonstrated an incredible perseverance in reshaping their shattered town and lives. Filled with fascinating and dramatic stories of hardship, conflict, continuity, and change, the engaging narrative describes how Boston rebounded in less than twenty-five years through the efforts of inhabitants who survived the ordeal of the siege, those who fled British occupation and returned after the war, and the influx of citizens from many different places seeking new opportunities in the growing city. Carr explores the complex forces that drove Boston's transformation, taking into consideration such topics as the built environment and the town's neighborhoods, the impact of town government on peoples' lives, the day-to-day trials of restoring and managing the community, the effect of the postwar economy on work and daily life, and forms of leisure and theater entertainment.

Mapping Latin America

Mapping Latin America PDF Author: Jordana Dym
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226921816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
For many, a map is nothing more than a tool used to determine the location or distribution of something—a country, a city, or a natural resource. But maps reveal much more: to really read a map means to examine what it shows and what it doesn’t, and to ask who made it, why, and for whom. The contributors to this new volume ask these sorts of questions about maps of Latin America, and in doing so illuminate the ways cartography has helped to shape this region from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. In Mapping Latin America,Jordana Dym and Karl Offen bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to examine and interpret more than five centuries of Latin American maps.Individual chapters take on maps of every size and scale and from a wide variety of mapmakers—from the hand-drawn maps of Native Americans, to those by famed explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt, to those produced in today’s newspapers and magazines for the general public. The maps collected here, and the interpretations that accompany them, provide an excellent source to help readers better understand how Latin American countries, regions, provinces, and municipalities came to be defined, measured, organized, occupied, settled, disputed, and understood—that is, how they came to have specific meanings to specific people at specific moments in time. The first book to deal with the broad sweep of mapping activities across Latin America, this lavishly illustrated volume will be required reading for students and scholars of geography and Latin American history, and anyone interested in understanding the significance of maps in human cultures and societies.