Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Mappings explores what mapping has meant in the past and how its meanings have altered. How have maps and mapping served to order and represent physical, social and imaginative worlds? How has the practice of mapping shaped modern seeing and knowing? In what ways do contemporary changes in our experience of the world alter the meanings and practice of mapping, and vice versa?

In their diverse expressions, maps and the representational processes of mapping have constructed the spaces of modernity since the early Renaissance. The map's spatial fixity, its capacity to frame, control and communicate knowledge through combining image and text, and cartography's increasing claims to scientific authority, make mapping at once an instrument and a metaphor for rational understanding of the world.

Among the topics the authors investigate are projective and imaginative mappings; mappings of terraqueous spaces; mapping and localism at the 'chorographic' scale; and mapping as personal exploration.

With essays by Jerry Brotton, Paul Carter, Michael Charlesworth, James Corner, Wystan Curnow, Christian Jacob, Luciana de Lima Martins, David Matless, Armand Mattelart, Lucia Nuti and Alessandro Scafi

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Cosgrove (human geography, Univ. of London) asked 11 prominent international scholars to write essays "in the light of revisioned conceptions of mapping." These new conceptions are not succinctly stated, but they appear to share the expanded definition used in the University of Chicago's "History of Cartography" series: "graphic representations that facilitate a spa[t]ial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world." The approach is entirely Eurocentric. Topics range from mapping in ancient Alexandria and space-time representation in Medieval "mappaemundi" to "Mapping and the Expanded Field of Contemporary Art." The underlying theme is that in order to enhance human understanding, maps can, and indeed should, be more than mere geometric representations. As Alessandro Scafi notes, European maps since the Renaissance "could no longer claim to constitute a comprehensive space-time image of the cosmos, but only to mirror the surface of the earth at a moment in time." Recommended for academic and larger public libraries with cartographical collections.ÄEdward K. Werner, St. Lucie Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Pierce, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.