Chapter 362. Exercise CMS 3-2

ORIGINAL SOURCE

Maps, see, are a huge part of geography’s ongoing identity crisis today. As late as the end of the eighteenth century, geography and cartography were synonymous—interchangeable words for the same science. The world was still being charted and explored, and geographers were the ones drawing the maps. But then geography began to grow into a holistic scholarly discipline, and a funny thing happened on the way to the symposium: it lost maps as its center.

This happened for many reasons. Most obviously, the world got pretty thoroughly mapped; making maps wasn’t at the brave frontier of anything anymore. As a result, geographers began to see cartographers as mere technicians, not scientists or scholars. Second, once digital tools like geographic information systems, or GIS, began to be used to manage spatial data, focusing on maps felt old-fashioned. Finally, there’s been an academic trend toward emphasizing the unreliability of maps: their cultural baggage, their selectivity, the agendas that drive them. “All maps distort reality” is the moral of Mark Monmonier’s 1991 classic How to Lie with Maps. They’re artifacts to be deconstructed, like literary texts. It’s not fashionable to see them as the authoritative bedrock of a science anymore.

From Jennings, Ken. Maphead. New York: Scribner, 2011.

[The source passage is from page 42.]

Excerpt from Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks. New York: Scribner, 2011. Reprinted by permission.

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