In Creating the Mediterranean: Maps and the Islamic Imagination Tarek Kahlaoui treats the subject of the Islamic visual representations of the Mediterranean from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries ...C.E.
The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, to solve a problem, to point someone in the right direction. Maps shape and communicate information, for the sake of improved orientation. ...But maps exist for states as well as individuals, and they need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge, as Steven Seegel makes clear in his impressive and important new book. Mapping Europe's Borderlands takes the familiar problems of state and nation building in eastern Europe and presents them through an entirely new prism, that of cartography and cartographers. Drawing from sources in eleven languages, including military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps, as well as geographic texts and related cartographic literature, Seegel explores the role of maps and mapmakers in the East Central European borderlands from the Enlightenment to the Treaty of Versailles. For example, Seegel explains how Russia used cartography in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and, later, formed its geography society as a cover for gathering intelligence. He also explains the importance of maps to the formation of identities and institutions in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania, as well as in Russia. Seegel concludes with a consideration of the impact of cartographers' regional and socioeconomic backgrounds, educations, families, career options, and available language choices.
Depicting the world, territory, and geopolitical realities involves a high degree of interpretation and imagination. It is never neutral. Cartography originated in ancient times to represent the ...world and to enable circulation, communication, and economic exchange. Today, IT companies are a driving force in this field and change our view of the world; how we communicate, navigate, and consume globally. Questions of privacy, authorship, and economic interests are highly relevant to cartography's practices. So how to deal with such powers and what is the critical role of cartography in it? How might a bottom-up perspective (and actions) in map-making change conception of a geopolitical space?
How do you draw a map of 100,000 places, of more than a million flows of people, of changes over time and space, of different kinds of spaces, surfaces and volumes, from human travel time to ...landscapes of hopes, fears, migration, manufacturing and mortality? How do you turn the millions of numbers concerning some of the most important moments of our lives into images that allow us to appreciate the aggregate while still remembering the detail? The visualization of spatial social structure means, literally, making visible the geographical patterns to the way our lives have come to be socially organised, seeing the geography in society. To a statistical readership visualization implies using data. More widely defined it implies freeing our imaginations. The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure introduces the reader to new ways of thinking about how to look at social statistics, particularly those about people in places. The author presents a unique combination of statistical focus and understanding of social structures and innovations in visualization, describing the rationale for, and development of, a new way of visualizing information in geographical research. These methods are illustrated through extensive full colour graphics; revealing mistakes, techniques and discoveries which present a picture of a changing political and social geography. More complex aspects on the surface of social landscapes are revealed with sculptured symbols allowing us to see the relationships between the wood and the trees of social structure. Today's software can be so flexible that these techniques can now be emulated without coding. This book centres on a particular place and time; 1980s Britain, and a particular set of records; routine social statistics. A great deal of information about the 80s' social geography of Britain is contained within databases such as the population censuses, surveys and administrative data. Following the release of the 2011 census, now is a good time to look back at the past to introduce many new visualization techniques that could be used by future researchers.
The King's Two Maps Birkholz, Daniel
2004, 20040301, 2003-12-01, 2004-03-01, 20090101
eBook
While a culture may have a dominant way of "mapping," its geography is always plural, and there is always competition among conceptions of space. Beginning with this understanding, this book traces ...the map's early development into an emblem of the state, and charts the social and cultural implications of this phenomenon. This book chronicles the specific technologies, both material and epistemological, by which the map shows itself capable of accessing, organizing, and reorienting a tremendous range of information.
The Generic Mapping Tools Version 6 Wessel, P.; Luis, J. F.; Uieda, L. ...
Geochemistry, geophysics, geosystems : G3,
November 2019, 2019-11-00, 20191101, Letnik:
20, Številka:
11
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) software is ubiquitous in the Earth and ocean sciences. As a cross‐platform tool producing high‐quality maps and figures, it is used by tens of thousands of scientists ...around the world. The basic syntax of GMT scripts has evolved very slowly since the 1990s, despite the fact that GMT is generally perceived to have a steep learning curve with many pitfalls for beginners and experienced users alike. Reducing these pitfalls means changing the interface, which would break compatibility with thousands of existing scripts. With the latest GMT version 6, we solve this conundrum by introducing a new “modern mode” to complement the interface used in previous versions, which GMT 6 now calls “classic mode.” GMT 6 defaults to classic mode and thus is a recommended upgrade for all GMT 5 users. Nonetheless, new users should take advantage of modern mode to make shorter scripts, quickly access commonly used global data sets, and take full advantage of the new tools to draw subplots, place insets, and create animations.
Plain Language Summary
The Generic Mapping Tools software is widely used in Earth and ocean sciences to process data and make maps and illustrations. This new version simplifies usage, adds quick access to key data sets, and provides a tool for making scientific animations.
Key Points
A new version of the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) is released
A new modern mode, complementing the existing classic mode, greatly simplifies GMT scripting
Easy access to remote data sets and advanced animation building facilitate science communication
Advanced doctoral students whose dissertations are substantially concerned with the history of cartography are invited to contact the editor of this section (Dr Elizabeth Baigent,
...elizabeth.baigent@wycliffe.ox.ac.uk
) to discuss the submission of a short article. For a list of doctoral theses in progress see
http://www.maphistory.info/futurephd.html
.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The uptake of machine learning (ML) algorithms in digital soil mapping (DSM) is transforming the way soil scientists produce their maps. Within the past two decades, soil scientists have applied ML ...to a wide range of scenarios, by mapping soil properties or classes with various ML algorithms, on spatial scale from the local to the global, and with depth. The wide adoption of ML for soil mapping was made possible by the increase in data availability, the ease of accessing environmental spatial data, and the development of software solutions aided by computational tools to analyse them. In this article, we review the current use of ML in DSM, identify the key challenges and suggest solutions from the existing literature. There is a growing interest in the use of ML in DSM. Most studies emphasize prediction and accuracy of the predicted maps for applications, such as baseline production of quantitative soil information. Few studies account for existing soil knowledge in the modelling process or quantify the uncertainty of the predicted maps. Further, we discuss the challenges related to the application of ML for soil mapping and suggest solutions from existing studies in the natural sciences. The challenges are: sampling, resampling, accounting for the spatial information, multivariate mapping, uncertainty analysis, validation, integration of pedological knowledge and interpretation of the models. Overall, the current literature shows few attempts in understanding the underlying soil structure or process using the predicted maps and the ML model, for example by generating hypotheses on mechanistic relationships among variables. In this regard, several additional challenging aspects need to be considered, such as the inclusion of pedological knowledge in the ML algorithm or the interpretability of the calibrated ML model. Tackling these challenges is critical for ML to gain credibility and scientific consistency in soil science. We conclude that for future developments, ML could incorporate three core elements: plausibility, interpretability, and explainability, which will trigger soil scientists to couple model prediction with pedological explanation and understanding of the underlying soil processes.
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