Quotes About Cartography

If geography is prose, maps are iconography.

British cartography defined spaces the better to rule them; the map became an instrument of colonial control. Even the valuable British legacy, the museum, was devised in furtherance of the imperial project because here objects, artefacts and symbols could be appropriated, named, labelled, arranged, ordered, classified and thus controlled, exactly as the people could be.

To ask for a map is to say, "Tell me a story."

Of course, any map of the Place would be shocking to anyone with any understanding of geography. As you can see, this is a map of no earthly geography." -

I think of spirit as that which evokes us - the lure of becoming that keeps calling. And I think of soul as that which gets us through the cartography of everyday life.

Once, centuries ago, a map was a thing of beauty, a testament not to the way things were but to the heights scaled by men's dreams.

La triangulación es el método del cartógrafo. Si conoce la posición y la altura de dos lugares y ve un tercero, puede establecer su correspondiente posición y altura. Los mapas son eso: triángulos invisibles.

Also notice that longitude West and latitude South are represented by negative values.

we are just now beginning to take stock of how GPS can affect the cognitive map. We may be witnessing the mass narrowing of the human cognitive map—as a construct (a decrease in navigational ability), but possibly also on a more literal level, an actual reordering of our neurons.

wanted that kind of life even though I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.

TERRESTRIAL GLOBE (1492)

MERCATOR MAP PROJECTION (1569)

S. Latitude 34° 21?, W. Longitude 152° 17?

It was ironic, Amelia had thought more than once during the journey to Cloverhill that she had recently become so enamored of cartography. Because she was only just now coming to realize how thoroughly her own life had been mapped out by others. Even with all her plans torn asunder, her new map, with whatever routes her life was meant to take, was being drawn by others.

I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. ... All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.

I believe in such cartography--to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...

We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds. At

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, intently studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit, tracing the course of obscure rivers, checking elevations, consulting the marginal notes to see what a little circle with a flag on it signifies and what's the difference between a pictogram of an airplane with a circle around it and one without, issuing small profound hmmmms and nodding my head gravely without having the faintest idea why.

just longitude and latitude. Thirty-seven degrees, fifty-six minutes north by one hundred seven degrees, forty-nine minutes west.

Like world describers before me, those mapmakers in the seventeenth centure, I had laid down my first faintly drawn border. With that one tentative mark, my world expanded by a few freeing degrees.

In the cartography of the heart, the most meaningful connections are the landmarks that guide us home to ourselves and to each other.

Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that the often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all.