Mapping the World: a history of world maps from the Greeks to Google Earth

纵观历史，一系列不同的文化将世界的图像投射到地图上，产生了各种社会和政治上的重要结果。在摄影和太空探索时代之前，人们可以获得迄今为止不可能精确的地球图像，不同的社区制作的世界地图融合了政治，科学，艺术和想象力的冲动，创造了历史上特定时刻的地球时间锁定图像。这个项目研究了12幅这样的历史世界地图。它从托勒密地理学的经典世界开始，并继续深入研究中世纪地图的关键例子;早期伊斯兰地图;利用印刷，科学和旅行新发现的早期现代欧洲地图;十八世纪的国家调查预测新的“想象”民族社区;乌托邦式的韩国地图，十九世纪和二十世纪的地图代表了全球欧洲殖民的影响。它最后介绍了在线地理空间应用程序，这些应用程序正在改变对文化如何定义、理解和使用地图的基本理解。测绘领域目前正在经历彻底的历史和理论重新评估。该项目部分是对当前研究背景和关于地图学历史和定义的辩论的回应和对话（例如，参见正在进行的芝加哥地图学历史系列）。它认为，需要通过跨学科的方法，提供一个更灵活的理解制图的定义，扩大世界地图的概念和历史的解释。分析中的12幅地图是在特别关键的历史时刻绘制的，当时地图的绘制者就他们希望如何以及如何代表地理现实做出了重大决定。这样一种世界地图绘制方法的背景来自于人文和社会科学目前的辩论，这些辩论将全球化视为我们这个时代的社会政治动态。该项目旨在提供这种全球性的历史，从最早的表现到最新的虚拟，数字，在线地图技术。它的目的是解释一系列的全球地图如何创造了新的世界观，使他们的观众不仅相信世界是什么样子的，而且相信它为什么存在，以及他们自己在其中的位置。每张地图都包含了一个特定的想法或问题，这些想法或问题定义了他们的制作者如何理解世界，从经典的知识定义，到宗教，文化交流，发现，全球主义、测量、种族、国家、乌托邦、经济、政治，最后是民主。最后一个目标是确定三个核心和持久的元素，似乎统一分析中的地图：他们的先验要求普遍的地理代表性;他们的应用程序作为实际或精神指南的方向;和他们的知识渊博的要求知识的全面性。最终，该项目旨在解释一系列文化对绘制世界地图的持久愿望，以及世界的投影形状如何随着时间和空间的变化而变化。该项目的好处和应用有三个方面：第一，大力发展正在进行的跨地理、历史、文学研究和思想史的制图史跨学科研究;第二，为更成熟的进步和以欧洲为中心的制图史提供一个离散的全球替代方案;第三，在编写一本向广泛、知情的一般读者传播和有效传达关于这一主题的学术研究的书时，提供重要的知识转让。

Throughout history, a range of different cultures have projected images of the world onto maps with a variety of socially and political important results. Before the age of photography and space exploration, which allowed hitherto impossibly accurate images of the earth, different communities produced world maps that fused political, scientific, artistic and imaginative impulses to create time-locked images of the earth at specific moments in history. This project examines twelve such historical world maps. It begins with the classical world of Ptolemy's Geography, and proceeds to provide in-depth studies of key examples of medieval mappaemundi; early Islamic maps; early modern European maps that utilise the new discoveries in printing, science and travel; eighteenth-century national surveys projecting new 'imagined' national communities; Utopian Korean maps, nineteenth and twentieth-century maps representing the impact of global European colonization. It concludes with online geospatial applications which are transforming the basic understanding of how cultures define, understand and use maps. The field of mapping is currently undergoing radical historical and theoretical reassessment. This project is partly a response to and dialogue with current research contexts and debates about both the history and definition of cartography (see for instance the ongoing Chicago History of Cartography series). It argues for the need to broaden the conceptual and historical interpretation of world mapping through an interdisciplinary approach that provides a more flexible understanding of the definition of cartography. The twelve maps under analysis were created at particularly crucial historical moments, when their makers took significant decisions about how and what kind of geographical reality they wished to represent. The context for such an approach to world mapping emerges from present debates in the humanities and social sciences that regard globalisation as the defining socio-political dynamic of our time. This project aims to offer a history of such global imaginings, from their earliest manifestations to the most recent virtual, digital, online mapping techniques. Its objective is to explain how a range of maps of the whole earth created new visions of the world that convinced their audience of not just what the world looked like, but of why it existed, and of their own place within it. Each map encapsulates a particular idea or issue that defined how their makers understood the world, ranging from the classical definition of knowledge, to religion, cultural exchange, discovery, globalism, measurement, race, nationhood, utopia, economics, politics, and finally democracy. A final objective is to identify three central and enduring elements that appear to unify the maps under analysis: their transcendental claims to universal geographical representation; their applications as practical or spiritual guides to orientation; and their encyclopaedic claims to intellectual comprehensiveness. Ultimately, the project aims to explain the enduring desire of a range of cultures to map the world, and how the projected shape of the world has changed through time and across space. The benefits and application of the project are threefold: firstly, to significantly develop the ongoing interdisciplinary study of the history of mapping across geography, history, literary studies and the history of ideas; secondly, to offer a discrete, global alternative to more established progressive and Eurocentric histories of cartography; thirdly, to provide a significant piece of knowledge transfer in producing a book that disseminates and effectively communicates academic research on the subject to a broad, informed general readership.