Maps As Mediated Seeing

Your GIS maps flap, but don't fly. Flap/flop. The cartography course you squeaked through was Mickey Mouse. Maps as Mediated Seeing offers salvation. Read. Become a born-again cartographer.

For generations, the map has been central to how societies function all over the world. Cybercartography is a new paradigm for maps and mapping in the information era. Defined as “the organization, presentation, analysis and communication of spatially referenced information on a wide variety of topics of interest to society, cybercartography is presented in an interactive, dynamic, multisensory format with the use of multimedia and multimodal interfaces. Cybercartography: Theory and Practice examines the major elements of cybercartography and emphasizes the importance of interaction between theory and practice in developing a paradigm which moves beyond the concept of Geographic Information Systems and Geographical Information Science. It argues for the centrality of the map as part of an integrated information, communication, and analytical package. This volume is a result of a multidisciplinary team effort and has benefited from the input of partners from government, industry and other organizations. The international team reports on major original cybercartographic research and practice from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including the humanities, social sciences including human factors psychology, cybernetics, English literature, cultural mediation, cartography, and geography. This new synthesis has intrinsic value for industries, the general public, and the relationships between mapping and the development of user-centered multimedia interfaces. * Discusses the centrality of the map and its importance in the information era * Provides an interdisciplinary approach with contributions from psychology, music, and language and literature * Describes qualitative and quantitative aspects of cybercartography and the importance of societal context in the interaction between theory and practice * Contains an interactive CD-Rom containing color images, links to websites, plus other important information to capture the dynamic and interactive elements of cybercartography

In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure and instruction. A "carto-coded" America--a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful--had to be created. The Social Life of Maps tracks American cartography's spectacular rise to its unprecedented cultural influence. Between 1750 and 1860, maps did more than communicate geographic information and political pretensions. They became affordable and intelligible to ordinary American men and women looking for their place in the world. School maps quickly entered classrooms, where they shaped reading and other cognitive exercises; giant maps drew attention in public spaces; miniature maps helped Americans chart personal experiences. In short, maps were uniquely social objects whose visual and material expressions affected commercial practices and graphic arts, theatrical performances and the communication of emotions. This lavishly illustrated study follows popular maps from their points of creation to shops and galleries, schoolrooms and coat pockets, parlors and bookbindings. Between the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, early Americans bonded with maps; Martin Bruckner's comprehensive history of quotidian cartographic encounters is the first to show us how.

Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include. In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same.

This book is an important account of the state of the art of both theoretical and practical issues in the present-day research on conceptual change. Unique in its complete treatment of the questions that should be considered to further current understanding of knowledge construction and change, this book is useful for psychologists, cognitive scientists, educational researchers, curriculum developers, teachers and educators at all levels and in all disciplines.

Despite much having been written about what mediation is, direct observations of commercial mediations are limited. This book grants an opportunity to observe mediation in action and also provides external commentary about the actions observed. The book approaches Mediation ethnographically as a social process that is informed by structures, rules and norms that colour the environment within which it operates. Through the ethnographic method, a process leading to negotiated order is examined, baring its elements, identifying its influences and studying the movement to order. The result is the reconceptualization of mediation. The mediator is invited into the negotiation as third party intervener. He creates the process of mediation, defining the process by his actions, which ultimately merges mediator with process. This book provides a window to the lived experience of participants to mediation: it explores their understandings of and interactions within a process they have experienced together and demonstrates how mediation is a process inextricably linked to negotiation. The Fugitive Identity of Mediation will be of interest to scholars, mediators, parties who participate in the process, and to those active in public policy discourse.