The map is the perfect symbol of the state. If your grand duchy or tribal area seems tired, run down, and frayed at the edges, simply take a sheet of paper, plot some cities, roads and physical features, draw a heavy, distinct boundary around as much territory as you dare claim, color it in, add a name — perhaps reinforced with the impressive prefix of “Republic of” — and presto: you are now the leader of a new, sovereign, autonomous country. Should anyone doubt it, merely point to the map. Not only is your new state on paper, its on a map, so it must be real.
[Free eBook] Coast Lines: How Mapmakers Frame the World and Chart Environmental Change by Mark Monmonier [Cartography & Earth Science]
*Coast Lines: How Mapmakers Frame the World and Chart Environmental Change** by Mark Monmonier, a Distinguished Professor of Geology at Syracuse University, is an overview of how cartography aids with geology, free for a limited time courtesy of the the University of Chicago Press.
This is a layperson-accessible read, using both historical accounts and modern anecdotes to explain the tools and techniques that mapmakers use to measure and record assorted geographical data with an eye to turning it into maps, thus enabling scientists to chart change over time. Offered through the month of June, available worldwide DRM-free.
Free for a limited time, available worldwide throughout June as their featured Free Book of the Month directly @ the university's dedicated promo page (ADE-DRM PDF, requires valid email address). You can also read more about the book and see a table of contents as well as a sample chapter at its catalogue page.
Description
In the next century, sea levels are predicted to rise at unprecedented rates, causing flooding around the world, from the islands of Malaysia and the canals of Venice to the coasts of Florida and California. These rising water levels pose serious challenges to all aspects of coastal existence—chiefly economic, residential, and environmental—as well as to the cartographic definition and mapping of coasts. It is this facet of coastal life that Mark Monmonier tackles in Coast Lines. Setting sail on a journey across shifting landscapes, cartographic technology, and climate change, Monmonier reveals that coastlines are as much a set of ideas, assumptions, and societal beliefs as they are solid black lines on maps.
Whether for sailing charts or property maps, Monmonier shows, coastlines challenge mapmakers to capture on paper a highly irregular land-water boundary perturbed by tides and storms and complicated by rocks, wrecks, and shoals. Coast Lines is peppered with captivating anecdotes about the frustrating effort to expunge fictitious islands from nautical charts, the tricky measurement of a coastline’s length, and the contentious notions of beachfront property and public access.
Combing maritime history and the history of technology, Coast Lines charts the historical progression from offshore sketches to satellite images and explores the societal impact of coastal cartography on everything from global warming to homeland security. Returning to the form of his celebrated Air Apparent, Monmonier ably renders the topic of coastal cartography accessible to both general readers and historians of science, technology, and maritime studies. In the post-Katrina era, when the map of entire regions can be redrawn by a single natural event, the issues he raises are more important than ever.
In the book How to Lie With Maps, Mark Monmonier writes about maps and how users need to be aware of that they only are a representation of reality. That one can't trust them fully. Maps must be lying because they are a scaled representation of a complex reality and because it is a flattened 2D image of a 3D world. Additionally it is a flat projection of a spherical surface. And I agree with Monmonier, to do this, you have to omit some details. During the creation of maps you have to take the liberty to choose what to include or not, depending on what suits the project. For me this is nothing strange, all maps show different things depending on the purpose.
At the program that I am reading, we have worked and learned a lot about maps and how to construct them. Depending on whether it’s a map of a city, a town plan or a plan of a building, it is obvious that you omit some details. This, as I see, has to do with scale. In structures of plans you must clearly know the exact millimeter where the entrance to be seated, because it might be built later. Like this accurate, it's not to be whether to make a map of Malmo.
What should be left out and not also depends on what the map want to show of course. The city has so many different layers of things, and you need to choose what to show and what to focus on. Will the map show where the green spaces in the city are, or where the city's various statues are placed? They will look completely different, despite the same scale.
Something Monmonier illustrates in his book is that you need to have thought through is a map's colors and how it changes to gray scale, and the pauses in between. This can completely change the information that the map actually wants to send out. These things I have not thought so carefully about before. Sure, the color makes a map visually uplifting, but there's that complexity that can make a really good map become difficult to understand. There is a conflict between the color decorative role and its functional role, and I am eager to read further and put myself into this. I think this book can be really good for people to read, especially those who are working to produce maps, but also to promote a more conscious use of them, where we understand and appreciate their flexibility and what they want to communicate.
In chapter 2 of his book, How to Lie with Maps, Mark Monmonier describes the three basic elements of the map: map scales, map projections, and map symbols. He insists that if you do not understand these three elements, then you can not use a map safely or effectively. The chapter works as a crash course in map and spatial literacy. Of the three components, scale made the most sense to me. Of course, a map is smaller than reality and a good map will contain the scale on it and be consistent to that scale. If only... because of problems with projection-- trying to represent something that is spherical and three dimensional on a flat piece of paper. This skews up the sizes and distances of things. I think I understand that, but to be honest, I had a hard time getting my head around the full explanations and the descriptions of the different types of map projections that have been used, including their strengths and limitations. Plane, cone, cylinder, sinusoidal? Conformal? Loxodrome? Gnomonic? Oblique azimuthal equidistant projection? What? I am trying to make the transition from armchair map lover to having a more critical understanding of the map. I am straining for map literacy... I better read this chapter again.
