Martin Dodge

Rob Kitchin

Chris Perkins

WINNER OF THE CANTEMIR PRIZE 2012 awarded by the Berendel Foundation The Map Reader brings together, for the first time, classic and hard-to-find articles on mapping. This book provides a wide-ranging and coherent edited compendium of key scholarly writing about the changing nature of cartography over the last half century. The editorial selection of fifty-four theoretical and thought provoking texts demonstrates how cartography works as a powerful representational form and explores how different mapping practices have been conceptualised in particular scholarly contexts. Themes covered include paradigms, politics, people, aesthetics and technology. Original interpretative essays set the literature into intellectual context within these themes. Excerpts are drawn from leading scholars and researchers in a range of cognate fields including: Cartography, Geography, Anthropology, Architecture, Engineering, Computer Science and Graphic Design. The Map Reader provides a new unique single source reference to the essential literature in the cartographic field: more than fifty specially edited excerpts from key, classic articles and monographs critical introductions by experienced experts in the field focused coverage of key mapping practices, techniques and ideas a valuable resource suited to a broad spectrum of researchers and students working in cartography and GIScience, geography, the social sciences, media studies, and visual arts full page colour illustrations of significant maps as provocative visual ‘think-pieces’ fully indexed, clearly structured and accessible ways into a fast changing field of cartographic research

Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation

The Map Reader

Maps are changing. They have become important and fashionable once more. Rethinking Maps brings together leading researchers to explore how maps are being rethought, made and used, and what these changes mean for working cartographers, applied mapping research, and cartographic scholarship. It offers a contemporary assessment of the diverse forms that mapping now takes and, drawing upon a number of theoretic perspectives and disciplines, provides an insightful commentary on new ontological and epistemological thinking with respect to cartography. This book presents a diverse set of approaches to a wide range of map forms and activities in what is presently a rapidly changing field. It employs a multi-disciplinary approach to important contemporary mapping practices, with chapters written by leading theorists who have an international reputation for innovative thinking. Much of the new research around mapping is emerging as critical dialogue between practice and theory and this book has chapters focused on intersections with play, race and cinema. Other chapters discuss cartographic representation, sustainable mapping and visual geographies. It also considers how alternative models of map creation and use such as open-source mappings and map mash-up are being creatively explored by programmers, artists and activists. There is also an examination of the work of various ‘everyday mappers’ in diverse social and cultural contexts. This blend of conceptual chapters and theoretically directed case studies provides an excellent resource suited to a broad spectrum of researchers, advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in human geography, GIScience and cartography, visual anthropology, media studies, graphic design and computer graphics. Rethinking Maps is a necessary and significant text for all those studying or having an interest in cartography.

Chris Perkins

About

Books

Join the club