The Map's the Thing

I just encountered an interesting set of metadata that usefully illustrates a pervasive and thoroughly problematic mind set encouraged by the ideal of cartography. In short, it exemplifies how the map image is accorded an existence that is distinct from its material manifestation, a problem that is only exacerbated by the online proliferation of imagery.

[update 14 May: I’ve made a few changes, to incorporate further information received from Gijs Boink, the Nationaal Archief’s head of maps and prints. Any continuing errors are my own fault!]

The Trigger

Something I was just reading mentioned the 1614 “figurative map” of New Netherland, generally attributed to Adriaen Block, which is available for viewing in the digital archives of the Nationaal Archief in The Hague:

The “figurative map” of 1614. Nationaal Archief, Kaartcollectie Buitenland Leupe, 4.VEL 520. NA has declared this to be in the public domain. Click on the map to see high-res version.

The map is a frequent element in the histories of Europe’s early colonizing of North America (e.g., Schmidt 1997, 557–58) and of Dutch imperial mapping (e.g., Schilder 2017, 502–7). The map is untitled, other than the prominent toponym “Niev Nederlandt,” which could be taken for a title; the officers of the New Netherland Company called the map the “figurative caerte” in a petition to the States General, and the name has stuck (Schilder 2017, 502n3).

But the essay I was reading provided a link not to the above image of the original but to this one:

New York Public Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, Stokes 1614-B-5. Described as being a water-color drawing, 66 x 49 cm. NYPL as declared this to be in the public domain. Click on map to go to NYPL site.

What raised my hackles was the manner in which this second image was catalogued by NYPL’s print curators. When one first goes to the image, one sees this:

Screen shot, 9 May 2020.

Prominent in this initial view is the field among the summary metadata, “DATE CREATED” with the value “1614.” One then has to scroll past a large section of technical information, relevant only to NYPL staff, explaining just where the work is located within the archival hierarchy of collections. (Have NYPL’s digital gurus not learned Edward Tufte’s basic argument that institutions tend to structure information around institutional divisions and not user’s needs?) Although, to be honest, the metadata does provide thumbnails to entice a grazing reader to look at something else:

Screen shot. 9 May 2020

As one scrolls further down to the “Item Data,” we get the repeated insistence under “DATES/ORIGIN” that this work was created in 1614:

Screen shot, 9 May 2020

Finally, scrolling still further, we find under “NOTES” the recognition that this work is in fact a nineteenth-century copy of the original work in the Rijksarchief (which actually was merged in 2002 with other archives to form the Nationaal Archief, just as the UK’s Public Record Office became The National Archives in 2003). This recognition is counteracted by the presence, at the end of the metadata, of a cute little, automatically generated, “ITEM TIMELINE OF EVENTS” which runs from “Created” (1614), to “Digitized” (2015), to “Found by you!” (2020):

Screen shot, 9 May 2020

The Issue

Why is this an issue? Because the work imaged by NYPL was not created in 1614.

The NYPL curators have followed the common practice of dating maps by the date of the image/data and not by the date of the item’s creation. This manifests a complex body of beliefs that have long held sway within the ideal of cartography: maps are algorithmic reductions of the world (“depleted homologues,” per Fremlin and Robinson 1998); maps are repositories of spatial data; maps are equivalent to the archive of spatial data that they graphically reproduce; “the map” is thus a graphic presentation (not re-presentation) of the archive of spatial information. Map–archive–world exist as a conceptual entanglement.

The entanglement has only worsened with the application of digital technologies to mapping. When computers were first used to store spatial datasets, there was a tendency to call such datasets “maps.” One practitioner gave a presentation in June 1989 to the New England Map Organization in which he explicitly argued that maps are no different from the digital databases on which they are based (Cooke 1989; see Woodward’s 1992 complaint). Several editions of the Dictionary of Human Geography (1st, 1981; 2nd, 1986; 3rd 1994) thus contained an entry entitled not “Map” but rather “Map Image and Map,” which began:

The map image is a structured cartographic representation of selected spatial information. The image becomes a map when represented physically (e.g. classical topographical map, or braille), virtually (e.g. on a computer screen), or linguistically (e.g., verbal or written spatial instructions) (see Cartography).

The encoded real-world conception of a cartographer (or others such as a national mapping agency) is transmitted to a map reader through the map image, itself the result of processes such as generalization, symbolization etc. … (Blakemore 1994, 355; italics recreate cross-references in the text that were typeset in small caps)

Even as this commentator was very much open to a sociocultural approach to studying maps—to multiple representational strategies and, as he continued, to the idea that maps do not have to be “scientific”—he remained wedded to the older entanglement established by the ideal of cartography.

Facsimiles offer a variation on this theme, beginning with the origins of the ideal of cartography in the 1820s (Edney 2019, 114–20) and of the organized practice of the “history of cartography.” Pioneer historians of cartography treated early maps as repositories of geographical information and were not necessarily careful about going back to the original. Consider, for example, the eight-sheet facsimile of Fra Mauro’s famous mappamundi, ca. 1450, that the second viscount of Santarém published in 1854 as a lithographic line drawing. Santarém had taken his tracing not from the original work housed in Venice’s Biblioteca Marciana, but rather from a full-color manuscript reproduction that a group of British worthies had commissioned and then deposited in the British Museum in 1807 (Barber and Harper 2010, 52–53). Angelo Cattaneo (2006) demonstrated this sequence of copying because the British copy curiously relocated Fra Mauro’s depiction of Paradise from the lower-left corner of the original to the lower-right corner, a change perpetuated by Santarém. Map historians throughout the nineteenth century collected their own tracings of maps, whether from originals or from those already taken by other scholars, sometimes publishing them. Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld unabashedly took many of the facsimiles of early marine charts in his Periplus (1897) from previously made facsimiles.

What to my modern and digitally familiar mind appear to be acts of historiographical indiscrimination were actually a matter of pragmatic necessity. Before the improvement of photography and printing in the twentieth century, the only early maps that scholars could examine were the originals scattered across Europe’s libraries and archives, the few originals that came on the market and that one could afford to acquire, or tracings, whether or not published. And this is the context in which Phelps Stokes “collected” the figurative map as a watercolor copy as part of his collection of early prints, drawings, and maps showing Manhattan. [19 May: the following sentence corrects an initial misstatement] Although, what Stokes reproduced in his Iconography of Manhattan Island appears to be a monochrome photography of yet another tracing of the original (Stokes 1915–28@2: C pl. 23). [n1]

Monochrome reproduction of the original figurative map in Stokes, Iconography, vol. 2 (1916)

Moreover, if the purpose of historical study is to be able to assess the quality and extent of a map’s geographical information, so as to place the map in a progressive sequence of maps of the world or of particular areas and thereby demonstrate the rise of Western civilization or of one’s nation—as was the case from the 1840s into the late twentieth century—then it seems permissible to study early maps through facsimiles.

But as map scholarship increasingly moved into a sociocultural mode, starting in the 1980s, scholars have continued to reproduce facsimiles as if they were the originals. Some examples:

• Denis Wood (1992, 23) reproduced a mid-nineteenth century facsimile by Edme François Jomard’s facsimiles as if it were the Beatus-style mappamundi from a twelfth-century manuscript held in Turin;

• Liam Mouritz (2018, 114) reproduced Jomard’s redrawing of the thirteenth-century carte Pisane, properly admitting the image was of a nineteenth century facsimile, but then he also reproduced color photographs of two other early marine maps, so why not the carte Pisane?

• The morning after I encountered Mouritz’s essay, I received an email advertising a forthcoming public talk at a major US university map collection, in which the banner image comprised four small facsimiles of globes and hemispheres (one quite misattributed) taken from late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century works, presumably because these simplified and edited images captured the progression in the depiction of South America more effectively than would have images of the originals themselves.

• Biedermann (2019, 225) listed the 1989 facsimile reproduction of the viscount of Santarém’s 1849–54 facsimile atlas under “published primary sources.”

These examples—and now the NYPL’s print collection’s cataloguing of the Figurative Map—all indicate the degree to which the modern ideal continues to hold sway, even in the minds of the most sophisticated scholars, such that it is permissible to treat the facsimile as being directly equivalent to an original.

Facsimiles Are Mediated Documents

There is, in fact, no distinction to be drawn between the “map image” and the “map.” They are both physical in nature: whether a map on paper or vellum or as radiation from light-emitting diodes. In the era of photography, it is possible to put the same image on different media: think of how the famous London underground map appears on the walls of underground stations, in online images at tfl.gov.uk, which also offers other formats for the consumer, both color and monochrome:

Screen shot, 9 May 2020. Click on image to go to the TfL site.

And, the same map appears on coffee mugs and t-shirts and shopping bags and postcards as a touristic symbol for London. But are all these the “same map”? No. Because the map is the image-and-material together. The underground map on a t-shirt is consumed in a quite different manner and in quite different contexts (away from the trains!) than the “same map” on a wall in a tube station. The former is a cultural statement of personal status, the latter is an instrument to be examined carefully by tourists and ignored by the daily commuter. As maps are translated from one medium to another, from one archival context to another, from one spatial discourse to another, they change.

The act of copying a map is a process of mediation, a process that necessarily entails modification and reinterpretation. We have come to think of “facsimiles” as exact copies—although never so exact as to be able to be mistaken for the original, in which case they would be forgeries! The mark of the forgery is the attempt to recreate the “aura” of authenticity possessed by original works of art, the noumenal quality stemming from their physical character, situation, and history (Benjamin 1969). No matter how exact, facsimiles eliminate or downplay certain elements in order to emphasize others. Compare the digital images of the original figurative map and of Stoke’s watercolor copy:

Immediately, one can see the results of the choices made by the copyist. The rhumb lines have been markedly lightened even as the text has been darkened for emphasis, the green-blue adjusted to be less green (although that might be a function of the digital imaging of the two works), the addition of several certificates of accuracy at the bottom of the copy. More important, the copy is manifestly on paper and has lost the visual feel of vellum.

The rule that no copy is unmediated applies equally to digital reproductions. Color is a persistent issue, and great pains must be taken to match the color models used in processing images to the displays one uses to view the images. Also, viewing images of maps on digital screens play havoc with the reader’s sense of the original’s size.

In using facsimiles of early maps—as we must, whether digital or hard copy—we should never, ever confuse the original for the copy. The task for the librarian is to catalog the thing, not the image. To do otherwise is to fall back on the utterly misguided convictions of the ideal of cartography that, somehow, map data exist separately from the map, that the map is nonetheless solely to be understood as a data repository.

The map’s the thing.

(rant over)

Notes

n1. Gijs kindly pointed me to two chromolithograph facsimiles of the figurative map in the Nationaal Archief’s collections, numbered 4.VEL 521A and 521B, made with the permission of R. C. Bakhuizen van den Brink, general state archivist (1856–65), the two states differing only slightly in the address of the lithographer Elias Spanier (1821–1863). They can be viewed, and downloaded from http://proxy.handle.net/10648/9e0481ee-af94-1c96-a42f-44a522935d3b and http://proxy.handle.net/10648/c46b7b98-bd3c-f17d-bff4-1166fc872693. At the same time, Gijs noted that it is possible to download a high resolution version of the Stokes facsimile from the NYPL website, from which one can see that it was made in 1841. The monochrome image in Stokes (1916) has a prominent network of rhumb lines, lacking on the Stokes facsimile; also the lettering is much stronger than on the original. But the two chromolithographs, like the Stokes facsimile, have much different content for the area of loss in the original, just below the red “Groote Riviere van nieu Nederlandt” at the far left. Either that loss occurred after the facsimiles were produced, or the facsimiles were all modified.

References

Barber, Peter, and Tom Harper. 2010. Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art. London: British Library.

Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Translated by Harry Zohn. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217–51. New York: Schocken Books. Originally published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5, no. 1 (1936).

Biedermann, Zoltan. (Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blakemore, Michael J. 1994. “Map Image and Map.” In The Dictionary of Human Geography, edited by R. J. Johnston, Derek Gregory, and David M. Smith, 355. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Reference.

Cattaneo, Angelo. 2006. “L’Atlas del visconte de Santarém: Una storia culturale europa tra erudizione orientalismo e colonialismo.” In A história da cartografia na obra do 2.º visconde de Santarém. Exposição cartobibliográfica, 24 de Novembro de 2006 a 10 de Fevereiro de 2007, edited by João Carlos García and Maria Joaquina Feijoo, 17–49. Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional.

Cooke, Donald F. 1989. “The Invisible Map: ‘Computers and the Death of Cartography?’” Second Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Map Organization, 8 June 1989.

Fremlin, Gerald, and Arthur H. Robinson. 1998. Maps as Mediated Seeing. Cartographica 35, nos. 1–2: Monograph 51. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Reprinted and revised as Maps as Mediated Seeing: Fundamentals of Cartography (Victoria, B.C.: Trafford Publishing, 2005).

Mouritz, Liam. 2018. “Mapping the Ocean: Investigating Portolan Charts to Dislodge the Binary between Territorial Land and Mobile Ocean.” In Landscape as Territory, edited by Clara Olóriz Sanjuán, 114–21. London: Architectural Association.

Nordenskiöld, Adolf Erik. 1897. Periplus: An Essay on the Early History of Charts and Sailing Directions. Translated by Francis A. Bather. Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt. Originally published as Periplus: Utkast till sjokortens och sjobockernas aldsta historia (Stockholm: [Norstedt], 1897).

Schilder, Günter. 2017. Early Dutch Maritime Cartography: The North Netherland School of Cartography (c. 1580–c. 1620). Leiden: HES & De Graaf.

Schmidt, Benjamin. 1997. “Mapping an Empire: Cartographic and Colonial Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and English America.” William & Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 54: 549–78.

Stokes, I. N. Phelps. 1915–28. The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, Compiled from Original Sources and Illustrated by Photo-Intaglio Reproductions of Important Maps, Plans, Views, and Documents in Public and Private Collections. 6 vols. New York: Robert H. Dodd.

Wood, Denis. 1992. The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press.

Woodward, David. 1992. “Representations of the World.” In Geography’s Inner Worlds: Pervasive Themes in Contemporary American Geography, edited by Ronald F. Abler, Melvin G. Marcus, and Judy M. Olson, 50–73. Occasional Publications of the Association of American Geographers, 2. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.