Book Reviews

Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era. Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer, eds. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 272p. Hardcover, $45.00 (ISBN 978-0226718590).

“I thought you didn’t want to see another map again,” my partner joked as I held up the book I was sent to review. Indeed, that’s a sentiment I uttered more than a few times three years ago, when I graduated from library school and went on the job market after 10 years of working in a university map collection and on several historical mapping projects. It was in these roles that I learned the nuances of digitization, visualization, and time-series data structures using geographic information systems (GIS) software. Over my time in the library, I became disillusioned with a number of trends not isolated to my workplace, including the fetishization of rare materials, the elision of labor, the detached overtheorization of “the archive,” and the extensive intellectual gatekeeping meant to exclude those seen as lacking the appropriate credentials and occupational categories to produce scholarship. Indeed, I thought I’d be the right person to take on Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to our Digital Era, given my expertise in the production, distribution, and access of (historical) maps. However, the book’s explorations break little new ground outside the domain of histories of cartography. The digital era promised in the book’s subtitle is not a point of arrival, as suggested, but an insistence that even more study into a format and genre that has seen considerable scholarly attention for centuries is needed, with minimal ethical engagement with the conditions of the production and reproduction of paper maps.

The editors’ introduction lays out five premises for the book as a whole:

The production of self-consciously historical maps was a hallmark of the global early modern age.

“Static” maps accommodate time in surprisingly versatile ways.

Diversity [in cartographic styles] persists [across cultures].

All maps tell time.

Cartographic archives change how maps tell time. (5–8)

I was hoping these propositions would be taken up by individual authors and interrogated throughout the book. Instead, these premises are assumptions that the reader is told to carry into the text. If one shares these assumptions, one can reach the author’s conclusions. I was most interested in exposition of the fifth prompt. Alas, this initial gesture toward map libraries acknowledges the opportunities they enable for historians in the digital age but not the infrastructure or labor necessary for these opportunities. Despite acknowledgment of the various colonial projects in the early modern era that led to the creation and reproduction of the maps and atlases examined in the text, this lens is not directed to contemporary map archives and library special collections, as if they are separated from their antecedents in discrete times of “then” and “now.” As well, it is worth noting that the institutions praised for their online collections are top-tier, well-funded research libraries and that all of the authors are either tenured professors at prestigious universities or directors of privately funded special collections.

With the exception of William Rankin’s opening essay in the collection, used to narrow the analytical frame and focus of the remainder of the book on time in paper maps, I was most puzzled by only minimal inclusions from “our digital era” and the paucity of examples from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To Rankin, cartography is most compelling when a singular, bounded experience of history is effectively depicted through static visualizations, anchoring the development of a “time-memory” to be read with respect to place. “If anything, animations and slidebars seem to be inhibiting experimentation with otherwise common cartographic strategies,” he claims (26). Such a perspective diminishes the significant learning curve (and, frequently, astronomical costs) associated with geographic information systems software, and excludes many projects created with more user-friendly, web-based mapping utilities, through which many previously understudied spatial histories have been told.

Several historical maps published in the twenty-first century are included in the text, but their productions are, in general, not considered. Olga Vanegas’ map of Aztec settlement, which ostensibly builds upon the same Sigüenza maps Barbara Mundy places at the center of her chapter, is included merely to provide spatial orientation to the reader. Are these studies not in conversation with one another? (I nonetheless appreciated this chapter for providing a perspective on space-time missing from my Eurocentric geographic education.) As well, the beautiful 2008 visualization of geological time reproduced on the front cover of the book is only referenced in a single-sentence afterthought to a chapter on the earliest American maps of deep time accompanied by the claim that “[t]heir children are alive and well and living with us today, a recent illustration of geological time shows” (167).

This is a book for science and technology historians and rare map enthusiasts, not for map or digital scholarship library workers interested in historical GIS. Indeed, even those coming to the study of maps via geography, not history, might find the limits of their interest tested by chapters dedicated to an examination of veils in map-adjacent illustrations and topological diagrams of linguistic concepts. By limiting the scope of the text to engagement with design strategies and their interpretation by map readers, this volume generally steers clear of political questions related to the selective inclusion and labeling of geographic features, as well as the human costs of colonial occupations and wars enabled by maps (with the exception of American soldiers memorialized through battlefield tourism in the final chapter). It also glosses over the work of surveyors and data collectors, instead chronicling the careers of individual cartographers. Though remote sensing and digital technologies enabled the automation of many mapping processes, cartography is not and has never been a solo practice. The focus on design also elides the massive apparatus of labor and technology that underlies not just the production of maps, but the systems that allow historians to study them now, through map libraries and archives.

Returning to the framing chapter, Rankin states that the fields of “digital humanities and spatial history…[are] the source of the most vocal attacks on static maps” (25). Though I am well aware that humanities departments are under attack, I did not know that maps were as well. Though I may lack the academic pedigree of this volume’s authors, I trust my instincts and map library experience enough to contest this statement. Cartographic scholarship is alive and well within popular venues and specialized academic journals. Perhaps the authors framing this collection would feel less threatened (from positions of great power, no less) if they assumed a more generous position toward map scholars rooted in the digital era, instead of foreclosing the possibility of engagement.

The fifth prompt from the introduction reads as a demand: “We expect these archives to be maintained so we can continue to do this work.” Perhaps this is a paranoid reading on my part, but those who work with maps and maintain archives are often accused of being “inaccessible” by historians (for reasons that range from copyright to COVID-19). We are also likely to have some of the most visceral understandings of time in maps. From the hundreds of “ordinary” sheet maps I georeferenced and visualized to enable groundbreaking studies of environmental history in Toronto and Los Angeles, to my reaction to the librarian who asked me if every sheet and edition of our 1:50,000 National Topographic System maps of Canada were individually catalogued, my understanding of time in static maps is nuanced, developed through my engagement with map users and maintainers instead of the mapmakers of the distant past. Those of us who study place instead of genre are well aware of how time and space-memory accrete through editions, series, and the experience of using libraries and archives to engage with history—all of these avenues for inquiry are excluded from this volume. I suppose it is unfortunate that one must click layers on and off for the fullest engagement with the places I have mapped, and that someone always removed my name from the datasets I created myself, but I appreciate that dynamic cartography allows for more complete histories to be shared.—Jordan Hale, University of Waterloo