A History of Twentieth-Century American Academic Cartography

Abstract

The academic discipline of cartography is a twentieth-century phenomenon. From its incipient roots in landscape representation in geology and the mapping of socio-economic data in geography, it grew into its own sub-discipline with graduate programs, research paradigms, and a scientific literature of its own. It came close to establishing a national center for cartography In the late 1960s. After rather sporadic activity before World War II, the period from 1946 to 1986 saw the building of major graduate programs at the universities of Wisconsin, Kansas, and Washington. Other programs were created, often with the doctoral students from those three. At the end of the twentieth century, cartography underwent significant changes in relation to the emerging discipline of geographic information science. The future for academic cartography is less certain, as graduate programs adjust the balances among the many components of mapping science, including cartography, geovisualization, GI science, GIS systems, spatial analysis/statistics, and remote sensing.