1. Maps and Power

2. • Mapping helps us make sense of how we
relate to the world around us
• Maps are socially constructed perspectives on
the world
• Maps reflect a tension between scientific
objectivity and subjectivity.
• Maps are not reflections of reality. They are
selections of reality.

3. Maps tell stories
• They project a world view
• They indicate the status of various
technologies at different points in time
• They are instruments of power

4. Mappa Mundi
• Mappa Mundi, Hereford Cathedral, c1300
• What does this map tell us about the medieval
world?
• Video: The Hereford World Map (The Folio
Society, uploaded April 2010)
• Note that it’s a T-O map; that is T shaped
division inside a circle showing the known
world at the time: Asia, Africa, Europe

5. Influences
• External controls (e.g. the purpose of a map
and who creates it)
• Internal rules (e.g. science and technology of
mapmaking)
• Regulation of access to knowledge (who
decides what is mapped and why?)

6. Sir Francis Drake
• Voyage around the world (1577-1580)
• Trip logs, maps kept secret until first official
publication in 1589.
• Why? Commerce, empire, regulation of
dissemination of knowledge.
• Maps were power and key documents in building
empires with penalties for recording new lands,
sharing maps. Navigators and explorers forced to
maintain silence and secrecy.

7. Drake’s Map
• First published account: Hakluyt, 1588—a section
of a larger volume on navigation
• But we know the prominent mapmakers of the
time: Mercator and Ortelius desperately wanted
access to the geography of his route
• Earliest map was probably 1591 by van Sype,
theoretically corrected by Drake (Library of
Congress Rare Book and Special Collections
Division Washington, The Kraus Collection of Sir
Francis Drake)

8. Google and Politics
• The case of Arunachal Pradesh
• Governed by India but claimed by China (and
called South Tibet), China and India were
about to mediate border disputes
• Before meeting, Google maps suddenly
displayed names in the province in Mandarin

10. Global Google Maps
• Google Maps maintains servers in China that
fall under Chinese law. In fact, Google runs an
entirely separate maps site, ditu.google.cn, for
Chinese users, which operates within the
great Chinese firewall.
• In fact, Google maintains thirty-two different
region-specific versions of its Maps tool for
different countries around the world that each
abide by the respective local laws.

11. How Google presents the world
• Google is also intent on upending our very notion of what a map is.
Rather than produce one definitive map of the world, Google offers
multiple interpretations of the earth’s geography. Sometimes, this
takes the form of customized maps that cater to the beliefs of one
nation or another. More often, though, Google is simply an agnostic
cartographer—a peddler of “place browsers” that contain a
multitude of views instead of univocal, authoritative, traditional
maps. “We work to provide as much discoverable information as
possible so that users can make their own judgments about
geopolitical disputes,” writes Robert Boorstin, the director of
Google’s public policy team.
• (From The Agnostic Geographer, Washington Monthly, July/August
20100

12. Neogeography
• The “new geography” is about people using
and creating their own maps on their own
terms. We create our own spatial worlds
online: democratization of mapmaking?
• How does the historic triangulation of external
controls, internal rules, and regulation of
access to knowledge play out in today’s world
of Google and neogeography?