comments

This week I commented on Dan’s post about modern cartography.

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maps in the twentieth century

There have been several major events in the twentieth century:

• World War I, World War II and Cold War
• the culmination of colonization and the start of decolonization
• the beginning of a space age, with the first launching of a satellite and with the landing on the Moon.
• the emergence of two superpowers: US and USSR (with the former to stay as such until now).
• the technological revolution with the rapid development of the new means to distribute information: radio, TV and computers.

All these events not only changed the face of our planet, but they also changed the scale of cartography. The fact that the major conflagrations have got the status of “world wars” is in itself revealing of the changing cartography. If at the beginning of the century, there still were large blank spots on world maps, (especially Africa, Australia and Arctic region) then at the end of the century there were only minor unmapped territories. From artifacts of colonization maps became markers of decolonization. It was often the case that the same maps, which were used by empires to colonize a territory, were used by former colonies to mark their own identity and national territory.

As an illustration of how world wars changed the American cartographic thinking, I would mention Susan Schulten’s article on Richard Edes Harrison’s maps. In fact Harrison reacted to the challenges of World War II and argued that US should be involved in this war a couple of months ahead of Pearl Harbor. The popularity of his maps cannot be explained only by their originality. It is the merit of the twentieth century to provide a favorable technological context, in which visual material could be distributed widely. Even if these maps were not televised and only printed, the wide development of TV provided a favorable framework for the special status of the visuals.

Another war of the twentieth century, Cold War had rather hot consequences in the field of cartography. The development of satellite imagery provided a framework for the reinterpretation of earth’s topography. The surface of the planet ceased to be only a sum of longitudes and latitudes. Then, it became possible to assemble Geographic Information Systems.

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grounds for hope

Take a look at this amazing girl!

 

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comment

This week I commented on Alisa’s rubber sheeting project.

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rubber sheeting project

Since I wanted to map a territory outside the US, I couldn’t rely on National Elevation Data from USGS. Instead I got a GTOPO30 file from the same server. Because of the fact that these files are very large, USGS provides them in tiles. I downloaded E020N90 tile and selected the area, which is of interest to me. For a better understanding, here is a traditional 2D map:

Below, you can see the same territory but from a GTOPO30:

As Moldova is a flat country, I decided to use the feature “Vertical Exaggeration Factor” from the “Scene” menu of Natural Scene Designer, in order to provide a better visualization of the differences in the terrain. So, I increased Vertical Exaggeration Factor from 1 to 5 and this is what I’ve got:

Finally, I decided to further improve the elevation visualization by changing the color scheme of the image. So, I imported a shaded relief overlay from the Natural Earth Data:

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comments

This week I commented on Rosendo’s post on material culture and maps.

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maps and material culture

In “The Material Map: Lewis Evans and Cartographic Consumer Culture, 1750-1775,” Martin Bruckner looks at the value of maps as material objects. So far, from previous readings, we’ve seen that maps are not only pictorial representations of space. They are also powerful symbols. Moreover they are not only symbols of power. In fact they do not only represent power. They exercise power.

Bruckner shows a different view on the role of maps. He regards them as material objects. From the second half of the 18th century an increase in the publication of maps has had a double meaning. On the one hand, serial publication of maps has made everyone more dependent on maps. In this sense, the power of maps have increased.

On the other hand, the same serial publication of maps has determined the mass emergence of standardized maps, and as a consequence maps started to loose value. Maps ceased to be works of art. They became commodities. They no longer represented the center of the universe (remember the fancy word “axis mundi”). They just occupied their places on the walls, along with clocks, paintings and other serial commodities.

Nevertheless, these standardized maps are not only decorations for interiors. They also have some value for the exterior. The point is that assembled together these material objects form the choir of modern “imagined communities.” [I guess everybody is aware of the fact that I did not invent the term “imagined communities”, so I do not need to explain it in a footnote]

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comment

This week I commented on Alisa’s hand drawn map.

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drawings & digital

Before I’ll start, I feel that I need to provide some context to my assignments. For my doctoral dissertation I am dealing with the history of a sugar factory from Rybnitsa- a tiny town in the north-eastern corner of Moldova. In order to find at least some general historical maps of this region from Eastern Europe, I went to the Library of Congress. I understood the difficulty of this task when the librarian from the Map Division asked me what I am looking for and it was rather puzzling for me to explain where this town is.

First of all, this town passed to Russia in 1793, after the second partition of Poland.  Then, after the October Revolution of 1917, it was involved in the Civil War, which made it practically a no man’s land for several years. In 1924 it became a part of The Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR) inside the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was a part of USSR. In 1940, MASSR was dissolved, and a part of it was ceded to Ukraine, while the other part united with a part of Bessarabia to become Moldovan Socialist Republic (MSSR).

From 1941-1944, Rybnitsa was occupied by Romania, which was an ally of Nazi Germany. From 1944 to 1990, it was again a part of MSSR inside USSR. Finally, from 1990 until now, it is situated in Transnistria, which in 1990 proclaimed its independence from Republic of Moldova, but this independence is not recognized by international community. So, as you see, it is quiet a challenge to explain in few words how borders change in that part of the world. Finally, the guy from the Library of Congress decided that he will give me all the historical maps of Moldova, Ukraine and Romania. After browsing through this collection I found an interesting map of Moldova:

This map was published in 1966 and was a part of a campaign to make this tiny Soviet republic a heaven for tourists. Anyway, I chose this map to show you the territory, which I’ve mentioned in the first paragraphs. Also I like it because it resembles the map of California from Historical Atlas of the United States. Remember it? If not then take a look below:

Finally, I used Photoshop to crop the map of Moldova in order to show you where exactly on the map is Rybnitsa:

In Cyrillic script, “Rybnitsa” is spelled “Рыбница.”

Now, all the intros have been accomplished! Let’s get to practical matters.

Since I couldn’t find a historical map of Rybnitsa, I decided to take a contemporary map and to adjust it to my purposes. Because I am interested more in the sugar factory than in the town itself, I decided to show the location of the sugar factory during a particular moment in time. The factory was founded in 1898 and existed until 2001. Obviously along with numerous territorial changes, both the factory and the town have not hold to their places. Borders have moved and they have moved in tune with them. That is why my choice was to show the map of 1926-1941.

So, here is a simplified map of contemporary Rybnitsa:

I got this map from OpenStreetMap. As you can see, there is no sugar factory on this map. So, I decided to map it in both digital and analog formats. At the same time, in 1926, there where no roads such as M4 and A279. So, I erased them, if not from memory then from paper.

This is what I got in analog:

And this is the same map but in the digital format:

It was interesting that although it seems that I performed the same operation with both maps, there was a major difference: in the case of hand drawing I had to reproduce all the map from the beginning, while in the case of the digital map, I had to erase some elements of the map. To a certain extent, this was a mixture of creation and destruction.

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