Pickles Publishes New Book

A History of Space: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World
John Pickles, Routledge Press.

Reviews

(from Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415144981/202-8344416-4523825)

Book Description

This book provides an essential insight into the practices and ideas of
maps and map-making. It draws on a wide range of social theorists, and
theorists of maps and cartography, to show how maps and map-making have
shaped the spaces in which we live. Going beyond the focus of traditional
cartography, the book draws on examples of the use of maps from the
sixteenth century to the present, including their role in projects of the
national and colonial state, emergent capitalism and the planetary
consciousness of the natural sciences. It also considers the use of maps
for military purposes, maps that have coded modern conceptions of health,
disease and social character, and maps of the transparent human body and
the transparent earth.

Synopsis

"A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded
World" provides a useful insight into the practices and ideas of maps and
map-making. It draws on a wide range of social theorists, and theorists of
maps and cartography, to show how maps and map-making have shaped the
spaces in which we live. The book begins by asking a seemingly very simple
question: what does it mean to draw a line? It answers this question with
the seemingly simple answer: to create a boundary, to define a space, and
to shape an identity. The book builds on this foundation by exploring how
historically maps have reached deep into social imaginaries to code the
modern world as picture and as exhibition. Going beyond the focus of
traditional cartography the book draws on examples of the use of maps from
the 16th century to the present, including their role in projects of the
national and colonial state, emergent capitalism and the planetary
consciousness of the natural sciences. It also considers the use of maps
for military purposes, maps that have coded modern conceptions of health,
disease and social character, and maps of the transparent human body and
the transparent earth. The final chapters of the book turn to the rapid
pace of change in mapping technologies, the forms of visualization and
representation that are now possible, and what the author refers to as the
post-representational cartographies.