Cartography: The Ideal and Its History

Introduction by Jörn Seemann, Department of Geography, Ball State University, Muncie, IN.

Without doubt, Matthew H. Edney can be considered one of the most influential and productive map historians of the present. Among his achievements are a large number of academic articles and book chapters, a book on the history of the British Surveys of India (Edney 1997), and the stewardship in the History of Cartography Project, initiated more than three decades ago by the late John Brian Harley and David Woodward. Edney conceives his new book Cartography: The Ideal and Its History as “the product of my entire career as a map historian (so far)” (p. ix), although he promises to write at least two follow-up volumes to discuss his conceptions and frameworks further. His central argument is that the idea of cartography is, in fact, an ideal, a standard, a model, or an “entire belief system” (p. 1) that prescribes mapping practices, defines the nature of maps, and creates cartographic “fiction,” according to values and worldviews of modern Western culture. Edney aims to deconstruct the history and development of this ideal from its prefigured stage in the eighteenth century to its crumbling, degenerating image in the twenty-first century.

The book is divided into four chapters, framed by a short general introduction and brief conclusions. Chapter 2 deals with the sociocultural critique of maps that has allowed the possibility for new interpretations of cartographic representations and the questioning of the normative map, but failed to overcome the underlying ideal. Here, Edney proposes a “processual approach” that emphasizes mapping practices rather than cartography as an overarching discipline or science. The following chapter presents a “checklist of wrong convictions sustained by the ideal” (pp. 52–55). Edney lists and discusses different preconceptions of the cartographic ideal (e.g., the ontology, materiality, efficacy, and singularity of maps) and their contradictions, limitations, and flaws that helped build cartography’s “web of beliefs” (p. 52). Chapter 4 focuses on the emergence of the ideal of cartography in Western society as an “apparently coherent, moral, and universal science of observation and measurement” (p. 103) since the early 1800s, from the invention of the word cartography and the creation of mapping professions to the mass consumption of maps in the present. In the last chapter, Edney provides the example of map scale as a normative principle of geometry, numerical ratio, and proportionality that helped create the idealized model of cartography.

Originally, the debate on Cartography: The Ideal and Its History was scheduled as an author-meets-critics session at the 2020 meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in Denver, but it had to be canceled due to the stifling consequences of COVID-19. This book forum includes commentaries by scholars from different disciplines and backgrounds (geography, cartography, literature, and visual communication), followed by Matthew H. Edney’s response to their reflections. Page numbers without a citation to a specific work are references to the reviewed book.

Commentary by Barbara Belyea, Department of English, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada.

This book is a demolition job. Like an American pioneer, Matthew H. Edney must remove a forest of preconceptions about cartography before he can build his own house in the clearing. The building project is promised in a future volume, but first Edney addresses a conception of “the map” (p. 1) as “the scaled correspondence of image to world, graphic form, a degree of semiotic abstraction, and spatial functionality” (p. 22)—an idea that has governed production of “normative maps” (p. 37) in European and derivative cultures over the last two centuries. Everything about this idea is “flawed” (p. 233); it is “an illusion … a chimera” (p. 102); its assumptions and pretensions must be hacked down (pp. 231–33). The tools for this destructive operation have been sharpened over the last three decades, by redefining the history of cartography in terms of theories and trends in the social sciences. At the same time, the map archive has been expanded to include nonscalar, nongraphic examples promoted by certain “sociocultural” scholars (p. 19). Once the lingering preconceptions are cleared away, Edney anticipates real progress and a new field of study, not of map artifacts, but of mapping processes, not a narrow ideal but a diversity of practices.

Edney writes well, with passion and energy; this book is a page-turner freed from the usual “dead hand of academia” (p. 231). Edney also writes from multiple positions of authority: He holds three appointments at the University of Southern Maine, and he directs the multivolume History of Cartography project published by the University of Chicago Press. He describes the map archive according to a categorization as fourteen “modes” of mapping that he has integrated into his teaching and editorial work (pp. 32–33). He condemns ten cartographic preconceptions (pp. 52–55) because none of the preconceptions applies “across the board,” to all maps (p. 102). Although he admits that some assumptions supporting the ideal are valid with reference to “certain kinds of mapping in specific periods and circumstances” (p. 102), he states repeatedly that the cartographic ideal is “fundamentally flawed … fundamentally wrong” (p. 233); it is illusory, “not … true” (p. 228). Like the “maps-are-bad” critique (p. 25), Edney’s condemnation of cartography as false simply reverses the idealistic argument and misses the point that “mapping processes” and the “spatial discourses” that support them are various, diverse, and historical (p. 102). Cartography is not so much an illusory ideal as one discourse among others, limited in time and place (pp. 4–5).

The “sociocultural critique” (p. 20) that saw map historians questioning the assumptions of cartography also saw them employing key terms and theories from the social sciences. Edney writes that “maps are semiotic texts, as is now well established by map scholars” (p. 36). He further states that “the semiotic strategies [each map] deploys” together with other texts “constitute a regulated network or communication, which is to say a discourse” (p. 41). In one sentence, Edney tries to unite the linguistics of Saussure dating from more than a century ago with Foucault’s revision of history fifty years ago, and apply their key terms to maps and mapping now. If a map is a text, an assemblage of signs, then Saussure’s emphasis on signs’ arbitrary linking of form and concept might be worth longer consideration. Edney’s description of “what mapping entails”—a “process by which meanings are constituted” that “depends … on specific semiotic formations” (p. 41)—needs careful analysis. A sign system, as Saussure described it, provides for the production of an indeterminate number of signs according to the laws of the system. In contrast, Foucault described the organization of a limited number of énoncés (often translated misleadingly as “statements”) that are elements already in existence. Foucault’s sense of “discourse” (p. 41) is a set of regulating forces that shapes institutions, sequences of events, forms of communication, and even human relationships. It is not “a network of people” who control “production, circulation and consumption” (p. 41), but an organizing design that implicates multiple aspects of social life. The discourse regulates the people, not the reverse. To renew and advance map history, Edney advocates a “processual approach,” a term and idea with archaeological associations, previously considered by Kitchin and his cowriters (e.g., Kitchin and Dodge 2007), that examines not maps but “the mapping practices that produce them” (pp. 44–45). In using terms such as “semiosis,” “discourse,” and “processual approach,” detached from the theories that defined and disseminated them, Edney and other map scholars risk incomprehension. First, they need to clarify their theoretical positions. Then they should invent a suitable vocabulary to explain their own ideas.

One of the most important challenges to the cartographic ideal of “the map” has been scholarly willingness to consider that various map forms—“graphic, verbal (oral or written), physical, gestural, performative, numeric”—are capable of “correspond[ing] in some way to the world” (p. 40). Yet Edney’s attention remains focused on the maps of “Western” culture, on the geometries of their projections, scale, and ratio—in other words, on the “flawed” cartographic ideal. Alternative forms of mapping are given short shrift. The ample evidence of volume two of the History of Cartography is overlooked, Beck’s “nonscalar” map of the London Underground remains marginal (pp. 218–19), and there is no discussion of Indigenous maps, either their various forms or the ways in which they communicate spatial knowledge. Instead Edney appeals to unspecified, unreferenced “anthropological studies” in another vast generalization, maintaining that “indigenous mapping was generally performative … lines [might have] been drawn in sand or on paper, but the weight of spatial information was oral and gestural” (p. 39). At the same time, he makes an interesting remark in his discussion of metric measurement: “Traditional acts of measurement could only ever be mundane and embodied, in that they all mediated between the human body and either things or the wider world” (p. 127). We have only to extend this difference of measurement to differences of map construction. One division is the heavenly basis of normative map construction (“Ptolemaic ideas of space,” p. 93) and the earthly, “embodied” basis of some Indigenous map construction (cf. p. 39). Edney cites Montello’s description of spaces relative to the size and situation of the body (p. 225), only to conclude that these spaces “are inapplicable to the description of maps” (p. 226). Again, all maps? Normative maps? Perhaps they are applicable to some nonnormative maps.

I end with one example of Indigenous mapping that suggests construction according to earthly, “embodied” relationships. In 1892 the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) sent J. B. Tyrrell to find a new route to Lake Athabasca. Tyrrell hired Chipewyan canoemen and ventured into the unknown, or so he thought. During their trip, Ithingo, one of the men, remarked to Tyrrell that a river they were passing was a route to caribou grounds on the tundra. Tyrrell thought immediately of the huge blank spaces on normative maps of the Arctic. He asked his canoeman to sketch the caribou route, not in sand but on two sheets of GSC letterhead that are now at the University of Toronto. At the bottom of the first sheet, close to his body, Ithingo marked the starting point; then he drew a chain of rivers and lakes extending up the pages and away from his body. To follow the route, Tyrrell had only to locate himself along the mapped chain. Ithingo’s little sketch was his “only guide” for the first of two famous Arctic explorations (cf. p. 52).

I look forward to Edney’s next volume, and to new ideas in discussions of map theory and map history.

Commentary by Keith C. Clarke, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA.

If your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

—Source unknown

When teaching my various classes on cartography, I often refer to the Rozel Point, SW Utah 1969 edition U.S. Geological Survey Topographic Quadrangle. My purpose is to raise a question for students that Matthew H. Edney makes foremost in his book Cartography: The Ideal and Its History: What constitutes a map? The trick to my academic exercise is that this map shows only a single geographical feature, as a uniform cyan tint across the entire map extent. In the center of the map in large capital letters, the feature is labeled “GREAT SALT LAKE,” and given an elevation (4,193 feet, measured in 1966). The older printed map is more effective as a learning tool than the updated equivalent, because the default view in the National Map Viewer shows instead of the symbolic cyan a high-resolution air photo of the actual lake surface, with variations in salinity showing as cloudiness.

I then introduce my definition of a map as a symbolic representation of geographical features in their reference frame and geographic context. I have evolved this definition over a thirty-eight-year career in cartography at the university level. The symbolic representation part, with a cyan tint standing for water, can be explained using as a metaphor the 1929 painting by surrealist painter René Magritte, known as This Is Not a Pipe, and viewable at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Obviously a map replaces geographical features with symbols, just as a picture of a pipe is not itself a pipe, which was Magritte’s purpose in creating the artwork. Symbolic representations do not, of course, have to be printed on paper; they can be digital renderings, three-dimensional views, spoken and visual directions on a cell phone app, or any of a huge variety of different tangible and intangible cartographic forms.

What features are mappable? Obviously a single feature will suffice, but cartography has evolved methods to show almost any visible or invisible attribute, and for any instance of space. We map with LiDAR scanners, X-ray machines, social media data scrapes, and overhead imagery. What we map is almost anything that varies over space, and that space can vary from subatomic particles to genes, to earth phenomena and out to the universe itself. What makes a map useful is its reference frame; that is, maps contain information sufficient to locate and place the map space into a geodetic or other coordinate reference system. This implies measurements, of position, distance, area and volume, and also error. As Edney so succinctly points out, measurement science has its own history, and measurements depend on technology, standards, and even mathematics in their accuracy and fidelity. Edney’s discussion of the advance of triangulation in providing the first reliable reference frame for national mapping (which he terms chorology) is well informed, although overly focused on the mapping of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I teach that cartographic history around coordinate reference frames falls into three eras divided by two technological inventions and about 200 years: the chronometer and the Global Positioning System. Maps created in the three eras are captives of the limits of positioning measurements defined by their mapping technologies. By definition, then, maps and map fidelity are also a consequence of time, and so can be treated historically, just as Edney does in his book.

My final definitional point is that of context. Why does the Rozel Point SW map exist in the first place? Here the answer is continuity of coverage—the map completes a series so that, if necessary, adjacent maps can be mosaicked together to show a greater extent. There are other contexts, of course, and these reflect the primary motivations for making a map in the first place: as an aid to navigation, to record geographical facts, to facilitate taxation, to inform and communicate, and to make war. Intent implies purpose, and it is the purpose of maps that I wish to expand on in this essay.

I agree with Edney that maps are the result of a practice, and that this entails the use of methods, media, and conventions, but it also involves transformations and assumptions. Chrisman (1999) defined geographic information systems (GIS) as an “organized activity by which people measure and represent geographic phenomena [and] then transform these representations into other forms while interacting with social structures” (185).

The net result is that maps are “things” that are the result of a set of human decisions about content, generalization, projection, extent, resolution, layout, and design. Even given the same technology and tools, the same map has many possible renderings. It has been said that a map is a set of errors that have been agreed on. Cartography does not have an “ideal” as Edney assumes, but rather a messy historical trajectory of better or lesser instances that got the job done, or did not. As Monmonier (1991) stated, “It’s not easy to lie with maps, it’s essential … to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies” (1).

So I return to my title and introductory quote, and introduce the ideas of map permanence and life cycle. Today, many maps exist in semi-tangible form only for the split second necessary to make a navigation decision. Thematic maps are explored interactively to generate spatial insight. In short, their purpose is fulfilled without them ever having seen a tangible form. From the point of view of the map creator, there is no intended permanence once the map’s purpose has been met. Exceptions might be maps created as historical records, cadastral maps, and commemorative maps. I am reminded of my reporting that during the first Persian Gulf War

two hundred years of overtime were expended in producing 12,000 new map products, 600 of them all digital, and in printing more than 100 million sheet maps for the field. Why so many? According to A. Clay Ancell, deputy director of the St. Louis DMA [Defense Mapping Agency] center, “You’ve got these things folded up and stuffed in your pocket, so after a sweaty day in the desert, they literally come apart.” In addition, many maps intended for air-sortie support were used and destroyed after the completion of each mission. (Clarke 1992, 84)

Now I move on to my point. Maps have a finite life cycle, and that is often short. Most ancient maps have long since disappeared. Nevertheless, many maps outlive their intended purpose. These are absorbed by either the map trade or by map libraries. Libraries have never really known how to treat maps, so they “force” them into filing categories (Edney’s fourteen categories, p. 33, Table 1) and invent inventory and cataloging labels such as “scale” that might or might not be appropriate (Edney, Chapter 5). Maps are transient and timely, but must be dated carefully for archiving if they are to be treated as books. Finally, if we assume maps have a “language,” we can read and critique them like works of literature, and using linguistic methods. Edney states this outright: “maps are semiotic text, as is now well established by map scholars” (p. 36). The book is permeated with references to maps as “texts,” that merely need to be “read” and interpreted. I believe this is a fallacy.

Although useful work can be done using these literary approaches (e.g., van den Hoonaard 2013; Dalton 2016), it is easily provable that maps are not books or semiotic texts, because they already existed thousands of years before the invention of writing itself (Clarke 2013). Edney goes out of his way to discredit the famous (and controversial) mural map from Çatalhöyük in Turkey: “The sociocultural critique of maps has clearly demonstrated, by contrast, that maps are made for specific reasons within particular discursive contexts” (pp. 70–71). Later, defending the archeologist who seeks to reinterpret the map as drawing of a leopard skin, he writes, “Meese was correct.” Are we sure? What about the other contenders for the world’s oldest map that predate the well-known Babylonian Imago Mundi (ca. sixth century BCE), the Abauntz Lamizulo Rock Map (c. 14,000 BCE), and the Mammoth tusk map of Pavlov, Czech Republic (25,000 BCE). Were the ancient humans who created these maps concerned about how their maps would fit into the Dewey Decimal System, or worried that they would lead to particular discursive contexts? I don’t think so.

In the end, Edney returns to the old argument that cartography is dead; indeed, he rejoices at its death (p. 231). The same has been argued about all of geography (Morgan 2004). Here I could not disagree more, having just reviewed cartography’s prospects for a new century of study (Clarke, Johnson, and Trainor 2019). Perhaps the era of treating maps as books is over (“Thank God!”), but reports of cartography’s death, like Mark Twain’s, have indeed been greatly exaggerated.

Commentary by Francis Harvey , Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany.

An important book at an important time for cartography and possibly the study of mapping, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History should become a reference for mappers. Because the map history’s approach might not be that accessible for most digital natives now involved with mapping, however, it might be easily passed over. I want to begin these comments by signaling my praise for the undertaking Matthew H. Edney embarked on, which led to this book. Although a full critique exceeds the format of this commentary, I will turn my admiration into some critical points centered around constraints of hermeneutical approaches in map history that I feel limit Cartography: The Ideal and Its History.

First, though, I offer some preliminary and more general comments regarding the book’s six chapters. It is a book that presents perspectives on matters of mapping that I think will be an affront for some and a balm for others, but we should take it as an encouragement for all who make or read maps to more carefully consider the two-faced character of maps. The most considerable challenge for many readers, especially those born after 1984 (the ominous title of a George Orwell novel and the release year of the first Macintosh computer), will be the map historian’s mode of engaging the topic and presentation. Edney has contributed considerably to map history scholarship and can marshal this expertise to support his arguments for deconstructing the ideal of cartography’s preconceptions. His considerations of context and knowledge of processes are the foundation to construct the insightful analysis of mapping with an unequivocally sharp point: Cartography is a myth.

Readers less familiar with map history narrative forms might find the presentation too drawn out and lose a sense of direction in the careful analysis of sources and scholarly historical presentations. What is a strength for map historians could be a bone of contention for many contemporary readers immersed in digital production approaches and baptized in the waters of pragmatic GIS, even if the book’s weight is similar to many tablet devices. These applied data scientists will find some pointed flourishes but miss new concepts to inform their mapping activities. Owing to the historical focus and its organization, they might find the book more of an iconoclastic work. This provocative critique of cartography relies too much at critical junctures on pointing just to cartography’s failures to fulfill an ideal. Indeed, we read that cartography should be buried because of its original sin: striving to be an ideal for all people at all times who seek to overcome the mystery of how what they know relates to what they and others experience and discover in the world and their successes finding strength in human institutions. The challenge, of course, is that although the practice of cartography always has a semireligious tinge of metaphysics in any established culture due to transcendent modes of rendering the usually otherwise inaccessible, its ecclesiastics have thrived in countless institutions and ideologies. They have created those seminal works that few might read, but all must cite. Blatant are the discrepancies between rendered image and actual experiences and multiple perspectives, but the odd faith in the “miracle of mapping” persists. Maybe cartography reduces itself among practitioners to a type of dogma to which the human mind turns to cope with the trauma of always misrepresenting spatial experience in their geographical relevance.

There is also an economic aspect to bear in mind: “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” says Upton Sinclair’s dictum. The interlocking of beliefs and economics creates self-perpetuating institutions with commensurate artifacts (e.g., maps) contrary to their knowledge, doubts, or just what many call common sense. This book deconstructs the pretenses of the cartographically reverent. Regrettably, though, it stops short of giving the large circle of readers its sets out to reach a coherent framework to put their ambiguities and doubts into an emancipatory grasp of the potentials of mapping (in any language or culture).

Underplaying the theory and methods, hermeneutics here faces its well-noted limits. A map historian’s hermeneutic interpretative analysis of a map’s particular historical record is a powerful analytical scalpel Edney deploys to dismember the persistent myths of cartography through exemplary studies of some of its cadavers. Interpretative hermeneutics allows the expert to lay out all the dissected parts with forensic precision over many pages, but it also offers interpretations that could well serve as starting points for reflections on how to go from deconstruction to construction. Edney points to these limits, too, but without structured presentation, these points can go unnoticed when the researcher sets the focus on only the method. In the fourteen modes of mapping, in addition to the ten preconceptions, the hermeneutical interpretation of cartographic process is weighed down, and breaks into shards of historical insights, yet underdefined in mapping’s infinite diversity that exceeds the analytical apparatus and the interpretive hermeneutical tools. Edney’s narrative construction of his argument around a Platonic ideal of cartography and the Aristotelian realities of mapping moves into more recent eras without even signposting the underlying theoretical issues. This rhetorical strategy has strengths and weaknesses, but let me write that despite these significant constraints, I see this book makes many aware of the contingencies of mapping and has many strengths to praise.

Reading Chapter 4, with its important historical insights, I wondered how the pragmatism from the New Englander philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce could well enrich the hermeneutical interpretation to take on board the indexicality of the map symbols through the processual acts of map reading. What about the institutions that mediate not only producing but reading? With so little take-up of social arrangements and performativity in mapping processes, not poststructuralism seems rampant here, as Edney suggests, but an interpretive hermeneutics that sheds many insights, but lacks a theoretical framework to organize them. The fragmentation and slippery categorization of mapping modes is an especially pertinent challenge for anyone now working and living with a double-click epistemology and ontological pluralism of the Information Age and facing the complexities of mapping’s boundary objects. Idealization and the hermeneutical approach combined can constrain the readers’ abilities to find the relevance for mapping practices of this era, in addition to the risk of tautologically verifying the participants’ understandings of the ideal and categories, which Edney points out (p. 22). This is a substantial issue that still remains underdeveloped; it also points to the importance of ethical analysis to reflect on the value choices map makers have made that the deconstructionist focus of interpretative hermeneutics usually falls short in engaging.

In closing, I touch on a few additional remarks. This is an important book for map history and should be for cartography. It is a book for many readers, though, that will not go far enough in connecting insights of Edney’s studies and map history’s insights with contemporary mapping. Through the dialectical discourses it provokes, this book has now, and should in the future, have considerable and lasting significance. As signaled at the beginning of this commentary, readers will need to move beyond a narrow literal interpretation of these lines from the introduction:

Scholars of all stripes and concerns need to reject the concept of the normative map and, more generally, the entire ideal and all of its preconceptions. Indeed, they must abandon “cartography” entirely except when referring to the ideal and idealized endeavor. It makes sense to use “mapping” instead, but this word is somewhat ambiguous. (p. 8)

I find these words resonate and speak to the pertinence of taking Edney’s efforts earnestly as motivation to strive to improve our understanding of maps we make and use. This book provides an evident impulse to better our hermeneutical understanding of mapping practices and grapple with the principle questions of mapping. For those who might set the book too quickly aside and miss these insights, fortunately, Edney’s Web site with its blog offers engaging points of departure to consider historical and current matters of mapping and the improvement of our engagements with mapping.

Commentary by Trevor J. Barnes, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Wittgenstein (1922) famously said at the end of his Tractatus that those who understood him should use his work “to climb beyond” it and afterward “to throw away the ladder” (90). There is some of that going on in Matthew H. Edney’s Cartography. At the end of his book, Edney says, “cartography deserves to die” (p. 233). His book’s arguments are to “help kill off cartography,” just as Wittgenstein’s were to kill off philosophy (p. 233). Edney suggests we should even “cease using the word” cartography (p. 233). That seemed rather rash, I thought, given it is his book’s title and forms part of the name of the chair that he holds at the University of Southern Maine, the Osher Professor in the History of Cartography. At times I wondered what cartography had done to Edney, enough for him to want to commit disciplinary murder. After all, he received a PhD in the subject and got a nice job. Impishly, I thought of Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch: torture by “the Comfy Chair … with only a cup of coffee at 11.”

Edney has his reasons, of course, but his position always seemed to me a bit over the top, and as I suggest at the end of this commentary, unnecessary. I don’t want to push my argument too hard, though. In part it is because I enjoyed the book so much, and in part it is because I am not a cartographer; even worse, I have never drawn a “proper” map, never taken a class in cartography, never used a GIS program, and for a long period I even faked map excitement. Sauer (1956) said, “show me a geographer who does not need [maps] constantly and want them about him [sic], and I shall have my doubts as to whether he [sic] has made the right choice of life” (289). I have had those same doubts. Ironically, though, they have been partially assuaged by reading Edney’s volume. It is beautifully illustrated, always scholarly and erudite, and despite its seemingly homicidal intent, infectiously enthusiastic about its subject. I gratefully learned from his volume many things about maps and the techniques and practices of cartography that I should have known but did not. His knowledge of maps is encyclopedic, his historical scholarship painstakingly scrupulous, and his cartographic explanations lucid and exacting. I had clearly missed out as an undergraduate in reading for a joint degree in geography and economics that exempted me from cartography (and coincidentally at the same institution at which Edney presumably chose exactly that class—what might have been?).

Edney outlines his larger thesis in the first chapter, “Introducing the Ideal of Cartography.” He begins by setting out two seemingly opposed positions: the orthodox “ideal” of traditional “normative cartography” and a relatively recent challenger, the “sociocultural critique” (p. 2). They are not so different, though, he argues, casting a pox on both. Each fails because it offers an unrealistic, idealized version of cartographic practice that when critically examined is sodden in politically suspect values (explicated in Chapter 3). Cartography must be rethought, which Edney does through his new third way that he calls “processual” (p. 6). The processual view is a stand-in for actual, existing cartographic practice: what people really do when they draw a map, not what they ought to do as set out by normative cartography and the sociocultural critique. Drawing on exemplars from his capacious knowledge of historical maps, Edney shows a persistent and yawning gap between the cartographic ideal version of how a map was made and its actual cartographic production. That disjuncture is enough to drive a historical cartographer, or at least Edney, to murderous intent, to deep-six cartography, to call for its termination.

I took Edney’s argument to be some version of science studies, a movement formally instituted in the late 1960s with the Edinburgh School, but with antecedents going back at least to Marx. Edney calls what he does at one point “poststructural,” but I think more pertinent are his several references to the work of Latour, probably the most well-known figure within science studies. In his classic text Science in Action, Latour (1987) made a distinction between “ready-made science” and “science-in-the-making” (4). Ready-made science is a view of science in which its theorems and laws emerge fully formed, immediately reflecting the world as it is, born of an instant, transparent, and implacable rationality. In contrast, “science-in-the-making,” Latour’s view, is about revealing the usually messy hidden practices that exist among humans and between humans and nonhumans as they are haltingly and provisionally joined, made to work with one another and stabilized, to produce science. For Latour (1987), ready-made science drops a black box over the practices of science, making them disappear, concealing dubious assumptions and questionable values. In contrast, Latour’s intent is to unbox science by prying off its lid to reveal the not always virtuous, not-always rational multiform muddied and complex processes and practices that lie below.

Although I appreciated Edney’s approach, I think there are some issues he needs to address in applying it to the history of cartography. First, science studies unboxes by getting up close to describe the varied and granular practices scientists carry out. An early classic study was Latour and Woolgar’s (1979) Laboratory Life that used ethnographic methods to make strange and hence visible the ostensibly mundane and prosaic practices found at the Jonah Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in San Diego, California. Those practices, argued Latour and Woolgar, were not so mundane and prosaic, but were the very stuff of science although nearly always obscured by a black box. I wanted Edney to provide comparable concrete, detailed studies of the unboxing of similar practices in cartography. He came closest to doing that in his discussion of map scale and geometry (Chapter 5). Even there, though, often missing were the fine-grained specificity of practices scrutinized in science studies. Further, describing that fine-grainedness does not necessarily require being there, using ethnography as did Latour and Woolgar. It can also be done through the careful sifting of historical sources as Latour (1993) also showed in his writings about Louis Pasteur at his nineteenth-century Paris Rue d’Ulm laboratory or Shapin and Schaffer’s (1985) account of Boyles’s seventeenth-century air pump experiment at Gresham College, London.

Second, science studies is concerned with the larger context and interests—social, cultural, political, and economic—that bear on the case study and are used to explain why a certain piece of scientific knowledge takes the form it does. For example, Shapin and Schaffer (1985) argued that scientific experimental practices developed by Boyle in his use of the air pump and the vigorous debate between him and Hobbes were an outcome of deep cleavages in opinion and social interests turning on the role of the monarchy and religion in seventeenth-century Restoration England. The mundane practices of science, scientific experimentation of the kind recorded more than 300 years later by Latour and Woolgar at the Salk Institute, did not emerge spontaneously out of some eureka moment of rationality experienced by Boyle, but were a response to the particular political, social, and cultural divisions that held at the specific historical juncture and place in which Boyle carried out his work. I always wanted Edney to provide similar contextual explanations, linking social interests to specific cartographic techniques and maps. There were hints of those social interests, for example, around the injunctions of capitalist private property or the calls of imperialism, but for me they were never fully realized.

Finally, and this takes me back to the beginning of the review, although science studies criticizes how scientific practices are conceptualized, it does not try to do away with either science or its practices. The issue is how they should be understood. Science studies is concerned with correcting flawed understandings. This, it seems to me, is Edney’s important point for cartography, too. We must understand what cartographers actually do rather than what they ought to do as formalized by someone like Arthur Robinson (he is Edney’s go-to normative cartographer). After doing that critique, though, cartography remains as does science after science studies. There is no need to off cartography as Edney seems to suggest. It remains vibrantly alive and hopefully it stays that way.

Commentary by Maria Lane, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Cartography: The Ideal and Its History is a provocative book by a seasoned scholar. It compiles insights developed over decades in Edney’s wide-ranging research and editorial work, arguing boldly that it is time to get rid of the term cartography and its attendant preconceptions. In this brief rumination, I review the most salient points of this argument and then consider how they might be applied in a course on critical mapping.

Fundamentally, Edney argues that “cartography” is a paradoxical ideal that unhelpfully constrains our thinking about how to understand and undertake mapping. He disputes the notion of cartography as an actual endeavor, pointing instead to at least fourteen distinct modes of mapping that operate within contexts of “particular spatial discourse” (p. 45). The aggregation and unification of varied mapping practices under the umbrella of “cartography” in the modern era has produced not a new practice or discipline, he argues, but rather simply an ideal that rests on a foundation of false preconceptions. For example, “the map” is presupposed under the ideal to be a reflection of actual territory, when maps are much better understood as discourses about territory (and other things). Similarly, the ideal rests on a preconception that maps are stable, material things, when they are much more likely to function instead as performances. Edney spends an entire chapter detailing such false preconceptions, carefully noting that some preconceptions apply to some modes of mapping. Their aggregation, however, produces numerous paradoxes, and their wholesale application “turns the intellectual gaze away from the myriad ways in which people produce and consume spatial knowledge” (p. 102).

Edney relies on a rich literature in map history to trace the emergence of cartography as an ideal, revealing its basis in a modernist project to rationalize space. He also offers an extended analysis of the concept of map scale, chronicling numerous contorted efforts to apply numerical-ratio map scale to all maps, even those using projections that explicitly cannot render consistent scale. This constitutes the book’s most detailed and original analysis, revealing an assumption that the most essential aspect of maps is the extent to which they reduce or generalize territory. He uses this as a damning example of how the ideal of cartography not only draws from “a web of idealizations that are deeply rooted within modern Western culture” (p. 228), but also interferes with our analysis of maps and our approach to making maps.

Instead of continuing our fealty to a false ideal, Edney argues, we must give up the term cartography altogether and focus on “mapping” as a processual, semiotic endeavor. He asserts that we should study maps in the same way linguists study communication: seeing “participants in spatial discourses [as] both producers and consumers of maps within a wider array of representational strategies” (p. 234). Studies of mapping should be empirical, focusing on how and not why maps are produced, circulated, and consumed. This new approach promises an escape from the paradoxical preconceptions encapsulated in the ideal of cartography.

I find Edney’s argument convincing, although it is presented through dense and occasionally combative text that underscores its position within a long-running academic debate. The book is clearly aimed at scholars who study maps and map history, which is a very small group compared to today’s universe of map producers, readers, users, circulators, and communicators. There is much here, however, that could and should be leveraged toward this broader group.

Consider the college classroom, where geography majors are typically required to learn map making as part of the standard curriculum. The subdisciplinary split between map producers and map critics has long been reflected in the structure of geography courses. Although the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science prescribes attention to the “relations of power and knowledge” that constrain map production in its standards for GIS&T education, it is rare for a single class to include both technical training and critique in equal measure. At my university, we are just now developing an integrated course in “critical mapping” that aims for this tricky merger: half a semester learning to situate mapping practices and histories in critical context and then half a semester applying a critical perspective to the design and implementation of a community mapping project.

As I think through our planning for this class, Edney’s book forces me to grapple with the question of how best to make new mapping-as-process insights available to students as amateur mappers. These students do not need to read detailed histories of cartography’s development as an ideal, and they won’t be energized (even though I am) by a treatise on map scale. They probably will be motivated, however, by the idea that they are part of a new generation of mappers whose actions and perspectives are causing an inaccurate and paradoxical ideal to “degenerate.” What guidance do we offer for what should take its place, though?

Edney argues that we must understand mapping as a process by which we build meaning and knowledge, and I suspect students will easily grasp the existential role that this prescribes. Cartography, however, makes this argument in a framework that looks back to the past; it offers precious little insight on how we might take this prescription into the future to enact better self-aware forms of mapping.

This, then, is the challenge for us in the classroom and the essential work we must do as a next step: We must help students frame their own learning and mapping with a processual lens. This requires more of the instructor than simply pointing out that mapping has social, political, cultural, and moral contexts. We must fundamentally organize the mapping classroom with a processual framework, so that students learn to understand their mapping skills as communication, as argument, and as building blocks of representation.

For the “Critical Mapping” class that we will launch next year, this could proceed in two ways. The first part of the course is meant to put mapping into a critical context. Rather than simply reviewing the history and critique of cartography, however, I now plan to use Edney’s framework: examining the fallacious preconceptions of cartography as an ideal, then focusing on how different mapping modes produce and participate in different spatial discourses. The second part of the course is meant to focus on applied mapping, providing students with an opportunity to build their skills in a community context. I now see this as a perfect opportunity to guide students toward a new, messier understanding of mapping as a way of building discourse and knowledge. Starting in initial meetings, I plan to prioritize discussions about the intent, meaning, and use of the mapping knowledge we will cocreate with community partners. I will also work with students to build a new vocabulary that foregrounds the performative and processual aspects of mapping, which we will present to our partners in design meetings.

I expect that this framework will allow students to move beyond a view of themselves as technicians into a new understanding of themselves as “mappers.” By situating themselves alongside others engaged in spatial argumentation and knowledge building, students might finally have the opportunity to move beyond the crippling divide between cartography and critique.

Only time will tell whether our new course achieves these goals, but the depth of this reconception surely reflects the strength of Edney’s own fine work. His many publications over decades have pushed us repeatedly to confront uncomfortable paradoxes, with Cartography providing a culminating and persuasive argument. May its welcome provocation spur others to new mapping engagements as well.

Response by Matthew H. Edney, Department of Geography and Anthropology, University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME.

It is a shame that we were not able to have this conversation in person. I know that the to-and-fro would have been stimulating, especially once we had all retired to the bar. I must thank the commentators for nonetheless taking the time and doing me the honor of reading the book and sharing their thoughts for this forum. It will be impossible to address every point made by the five commentators, but I do see a certain number of commonalities and issues of criticism to which I seek to respond.

Perhaps the first thing I should do is to apologize for writing a dense book. Yet to unpack everything would have required twice or three times the space. There is a lot going on in Cartography because it is a huge and multifaceted subject! Much of it became clear (to me, at least) only as I struggled to write it. Perhaps it should have gone through another draft. Certainly, there is room for more clarity.

One point of particular confusion, not only for the present commentators but also for other scholars I have talked to, is my apparent call in the final chapter for the death of cartography and the normative concept of “the map.” I should have been clearer in my expressions of homicidal intent, as Barnes styles it. What I wish to bring an end to is the predominance of the ideal of cartography and of all the intellectual flaws that the ideal promotes. That is, I do not want to end the practices that are commonly grouped together as cartography, whether analog or digital, practical or academic. Rather, I seek to expand the intellectual horizons of those practices. I seek, as Barnes notes in Latourian terms, to replace ready-made-science with science-in-the-making.

Another thing for which I should perhaps apologize is that Cartography is only the first of a series of planned books. My overall project was inspired by Smith’s (1996) ontological exploration of language history in his An Historical Study of English. Smith laid out how to conceptualize the English language in such a manner that its history can be told in a meaningful way. What might the map equivalent be? Although I began noodling in 2011, writing only became serious as a diversion from the stresses and stupidities of my home institution’s financial meltdown in 2013 through 2015. I finally realized, probably around 2016, that cartography is itself an untenable concept, and I set out to rework the whole project as “An Historical Study of Mapping.” As I rewrote, the project continued to expand, and it became unwieldy, and I have had to disentangle it into several works.

For its part, Cartography is specifically concerned with exposing the otherwise unrecognized ideal of cartography: how it is constituted and how it developed. I must ask for my commentators’ forbearance, in that the necessary examination of “noncartographic maps” (if I can express Belyea’s complaint in those terms), of the “social arrangements and performativity in mapping processes” (Harvey), and the science studies desired by Barnes will be part of future works. In the meantime, I am continuing to work out ideas at the blog that Harvey kindly mentioned, www.mappingasprocess.net.

I am not sure that I have completely succeeded in reworking the material I had in hand when I realized the uselessness of cartography as a lens through which to think about the natures of maps and their histories, and when I began to turn the project back on itself as a critique of cartography. I do know how hard it has been to get my thoughts completely out of the long-standing disciplinary rut formed by cartography. I find it of particular interest, how hard it is—for myself, for the present commentators, and for others who have read this book—to extricate ourselves. As long as we remain stuck in that rut, however, cartography lives. The problem is evident in some of the comments here. Harvey writes that my critique relies too much on “pointing [out] cartography’s failures to fulfill an ideal,” Belyea that I remain too fixated “on the maps of ‘Western’ culture, on the geometries of their projections, scale, and ratio—in other words, on the ‘flawed’ cartographic ideal.” Clarke responds that “Cartography does not have an ‘ideal.’” For Barnes, cartography outlives its critique, just as “science [did] after science studies.” Regardless of critical stance, each commentator retains the sense of cartography as some kind of thing.

What is this cartography, though, that has agency and autonomy such that it is meaningful to ascribe it actions of failure, fulfilment, possession, and duration? I am not being facetious in asking this question. There is nothing one can point at and say, “That is cartography”; nor to a network of institutions, and say, “That is where cartography exists.” This is far, far more than some petty semantic quibble about some easy shorthand expression. It must be so, when intelligent, articulate, and accomplished scholars react strongly and in such different ways to the suggestion that this autonomous, active cartography should, could, or must die. What is this thing that is not really a thing that either must be preserved or will persist regardless? Put it another way, what is the underlying mechanism of cartography? How does it live and how does it work? My goal is to explain, with empirical evidence, the mechanisms whereby people consume maps with effect. We cannot just wave our hands and talk about some mapping spirit, some Kartengeist, that somehow motivates map making and map using. As Barnes says, we need to pry off the lid of the black box.

When we do pry off that lid (as I could only begin to do in Chapter 2 of Cartography), we find that the mechanisms are not all the same. After all, the International Cartographic Association defines cartography “as the art, science and technology of making and using maps” (Kraak and Fabrikant 2017, 16). However these terms are defined, “art,” “science,” and “technology” nonetheless represent widely different sets of mechanisms. The only mechanism I have been able to identify for cartography as a universal endeavor—the mechanism by which it appears to have agency and autonomy—is that it is a system of belief intermeshed within the general belief system that is modern (i.e., post-1800 or so) Western culture. This cartography is a simulacrum: It hides not the truth, but the fact that there is none (Baudrillard 1994). Or, as Harvey usefully put it more poetically than I ever could, cartography is the “odd faith in the ‘miracle of mapping.’”

The ideal or simulacrum of cartography comprises a large web of preconceptions, of beliefs and convictions that predefine how people understand “maps” as a generic and unambiguous category of phenomena and the processes of their creation and use. Both Belyea and Lane correctly observe that my goal is not to paint with a broad brush. This point is very important to me: I do not mean that the preconceptions are all completely misplaced and flawed in every respect. So much of the debate over the last decades has been construed as either–or propositions: Maps are scientific and factual or they are social and cultural; maps are fundamental tools required of modern society and incredible tools of geovisualization or they are nefarious devices of empire that override and displace authentic, individual experiences; and so on. All too often, occupants of the common ground seem naive, as when Harley (I think) once conceded, having argued that all maps are inherently political, that sometimes you just need a map to tell you how to get home. Intellectually, this is such a cop-out! By accepting the limitations to the ideal’s preconceptions, we can start to occupy a common ground in an intellectually productive way.

For example, the particular cluster of convictions that I identify as the observational preconception holds, basically, that the making and using of maps share the same visual regime of perspectivism. A huge, vast body of map work has indeed been based on the direct observation and recording of landscapes through instruments that work through perspective, just not all by a long shot. The flaw is the application of this technological commitment to all maps, to treat the fine-resolution map of the environment as perceived by an individual map maker as the necessarily default and original map.

Clarke’s description of how he teaches reference frames illustrates the ontological preconception at work. All features are mappable, he states, from subatomic particles out to the universe itself (see Cartography, Figure 3.5) because they can be located in space within reference frames at any scale of enquiry. Therefore, he implies, all acts of mapping are the same, and the unity of cartography is preserved. Yet, Western mapping practices have deployed several different reference frames for different scales of enquiry, reference frames that are not actually interchangeable (thus the apparent paradox of “map scale” in Chapter 5). Even in Western culture, there have been mappings that lack such reference frames (thus the persistent relegation of the London tube map to the status of “diagram”). So, again, the ontological preconception might “fit” some kinds of mapping, but it cannot be held to be a universal principle. The same is true of each of the other preconceptions. Each has an element of truth but does not constitute the whole truth. We must be aware of the circumstances in which preconceptions are actually valid, and when they are not.

As I intimated earlier, Cartography provides only a limited and preliminary exposure to my own conceptual frameworks. Harvey accordingly objects to my self-classification as a poststructuralist and suggests that I am more a hermeneutic interpreter of map meaning; Clarke likewise, although he expresses himself in different terms; Barnes, that I am more a Latourian; and Belyea that, if I am poststructuralist, I am a poor one. I will admit that I have brought on board a range of inspirations, in large part because, for more than a century, scholars from a wide array of fields and perspectives have engaged with and written about maps. So, yes, I am likely not to be as pristine in my terminology as some might like.

I call myself a poststructuralist because of the manner in which I understand the organization of mapping processes. A structure is a system that constrains behavior even as it enables it (thus, Foucault’s power/knowledge). A soccer game is possible because of the rules, whether formal (e.g., offside and ball handling) or informal (norms of crowd behavior). No rules, anarchy; with rules, the beautiful game. What is open to debate in a structuralist analysis is the degree to which individual actors have autonomy to act. The structures themselves are seen as impersonal and constant: Freud identified the structure of the human mind as the three-way balancing of id, ego, and superego; economists have identified the structure of capitalism as either the “hidden hand” of marketplace supply and demand, or the labor–capital dialectic. Such structures can change, but they do so rarely, abruptly, and generally violently.

Language is similarly a structure: Abide by the rules, and communication is possible. Yet the structures of language change, with some elements being stable and others volatile. Moreover, as literacy studies emphasize, all languages comprise multiple communities variously divided by social and spatial divisions; some communities attain economic or political or cultural authority and their particular form of language is privileged, whereas others are marginalized as “dialects” or other supposedly corrupted or debased forms. Communities change their linguistic patterns for internal reasons or through interactions with other communities; interactions are inevitable because individuals participate in several communities at once. To be clear, language changes because of its participants.

Thus, by extension, the general poststructuralist position is that structures persist, they exert control, and they constrain; in doing so, they enable action, but not rigidly so. They are malleable and flexible. Better terms for such less rigid, more dynamic structures would be formation or, when it comes specifically to communication and knowledge, discourse. Belyea particularly objects to my understanding of “discourse.” Foucault’s (1970) narrowest definition of discourse as a “regulated practice that accounts for a certain number of statements” (80) seems to me to agree with the precise groupings of people interested in the world and its features in certain ways, and who communicate about it accordingly. How does the regulation happen? Belyea intimates that it is the discourse that regulates, calling it “an organizing design that implicates multiple aspects of social life. The discourse regulates the people, not the reverse.” This statement reads as a strongly structuralist position: How can such discourses change? We can acknowledge that regulation happens by humans who act in accordance with the structure, but that the structure permits variation in action, variation that can lead to new rules and therefore structural change. Our difference might simply be a matter of emphasis. I am especially interested in how mapping practices change over time, so I tend to stress the mechanisms of change; Belyea seems to want to emphasize more the mechanisms of stability.

Clarke will likely dispute my broad analogy between linguistic and mapping communities. Of course, maps are not directly akin to speech statements, nor mapping to language. Clarke has allowed himself to confuse “written text” (inscription of words) with “semiotic text” (a coherent assemblage of signs). Maps are plainly assemblages of signs; to deny that is to effectively dismiss the entire body of hugely productive map work based on Bertin’s visual variables. This is not, I think, Clarke’s intent: The confusion of terms supports only his immediate point about mapping by peoples before writing. Clarke’s larger point is that “literary approaches” are largely unproductive for normative mapping practices. I must note of the two works he cites as examples of actually productive work in that vein. van den Hoonaard (2013) is strictly a work of sociology; there is nothing “literary” or “postmodern” about it. I do not know Dalton (2016). No, Clarke is doing what academic cartographers have done since the 1980s and dismisses out of hand any position that does not contribute to map making as a technical practice (Kent 2017). If it does not help us make better maps, what good is it? Harvey’s prognostications are thus very well taken: “These applied data scientists will find some pointed flourishes but miss new concepts to inform their mapping activities.”

I need to say a few more words about the issue of change over time. My primary motive in seeking to emulate Smith has been to establish an understanding of the nature of mapping that permits us to tell the history of mapping over time without perpetuating misguided notions of progress. This is a question that has exercised me for most of my career (see Edney 1993, 2011). In part, it is an outgrowth of my own interests in the history of surveying and surveying institutions. It has become increasingly important to me, however, to counter a major issue facing the interdisciplinary field of map history. As Harvey rightly indicates, sociocultural critics have overwhelmingly focused on hermeneutic interpretations of the meaning and significance of particular maps or collections of maps. I find this work both illuminating and frustrating: illuminating because of the new insights generated, and frustrating because the synchronic emphasis gives us a series of data points in time with no way to connect them in a historical narrative, other than to fall back, as map historians have indeed done, on presumptions of progress and other persistent preconceptions of the ideal.

Speaking as a historian as well as a geographer, I find that the proof of any schema for understanding the nature of maps and mapping is its relevance not only for mapping in the present, but also for mapping in the past. Harley began his conceptual excursions by applying to map history the communication models proposed by academic cartographers; they went some way to augmenting and correcting the problems with map history, yet they proved insufficient overall. For my part, I find that the schema I have been developing does help me tell histories of mapping with greater nuance and a closer adherence to empirical evidence than would otherwise be the case. Without it, I could not even consider writing a history of the proportionality of map to earth and of the concept of map scale (Chapter 5) or of such a supposedly basic element of maps as the compass rose or north arrow. Indeed, as I note in Cartography, this schema has led me to identify significant flaws in my own older studies. My hope now is that an understanding of cartography as an idealization that obscures how people actually go about mapping will contribute to map studies generally.

In this respect, I am very much encouraged by Lane’s desire to incorporate the insights of Cartography into her new Critical Mapping course. The strategies she proposes are very much those that I see for my own detailed studies moving forward. The highly granular “science studies” that Barnes suggests offer another avenue, but such studies cannot focus solely on map making. Overall, there is a need to open up to humor and the absurd: Rozel Point SW is one of my own most “favoritest” maps (I have many) because its apparent futility—a detailed U.S. Geological Survey topographical quad of the interior reaches of a lake, denoting only water, a toponym, and a height above sea level—proves a wonderful starting point for a discussion not only of how people make maps in the modern world, but why they do so.