Abstract
Digital Mappaemundi (DM) is a resource under development to create open source tools for scholars to edit and annotate image and textual data content as linked data, and for other users to search within this rich content. For the purposes of development, our data have been medieval mappaemundi (maps of the world) and transcriptions of their geographical source texts. The second phase of DM's alpha development (2009-10) allows users to work with digital images of maps from medieval manuscripts, mark regions-of-interest within images, and associate textual annotations with those regions and then link one or more sets of digital texts to these regions, or target one or more words within these texts as targets to these regions. Scholars may create markers images with individual points, segmented lines, or custom polygonal shapes. Significantly, a scholar may identify any number of markers on any number of images as the targets for textual annotation and link them to any number of digital texts or locations within these texts. Additionally, a given marker may serve as the target for any number of textual annotations. Scholars may organize their annotations into groups called layers so that different research questions involving a single image may be addressed separately through annotation. Scholars may choose to view a single layer of annotation or view multiple layers of annotation overlaid on one another. A robust search function also allows users to organize the annotated content dynamically. At the time of this publication DM has undergone significant evolution in its phase three beta development, with applications for annotation and linked data beyond the original use case of medieval maps. For current functionality and features of the DM environment, as well as a list of medievalist projects using it, see http://ada.drew.edu/dmproject/ .
Highlights
Deconstruction: Eco-mapping: mapping for ecological purposes, usually at the grassroots by environmental activists
Criticism is inherent in practice, in which even the most fundamental forms of field mapping involve the self-conscious resolution of conflicting reality claims
It is anticipated that the critical claims-making of non-professional map makers will increase exponentially as the mapping technologies developed over the past century and a half by professionals are increasingly embedded in accessible online mapping and mapmaking tools
Summary
Mapmaking has been perpetually transformed, all but dialectically, by successive critiques. This was not, as it is so often presented, the solution to an urgent problem (as is made amply plain by the fact that it took two centuries for the projection to be widely adopted), but neither was it merely a novelty It was, deeply critical, of both the conical Ptolemaic projections popularized by Renaissance scholars and the plane charts (portolanos) long used by mariners. Mercator’s critique of the portolanos and the Ptolemaic conics famously took the form of his eponymous projection, a spatial frame which was no sooner published than it too became the subject of a critique that continues into the present Among those objecting to it first were the navigators for whom it was expressly designed. On the other hand, critiqued the Mercator for being “the embodiment of Europe’s geographical conception of the world in an age of colonialism.” Though like Lambert and Gall, Peters was not a cartographer (Lambert was a physicist and mathematician, Gall a clergyman, Peters an historian), Peters had no hesitation about critiquing the profession for clinging to a “closed body of cartographic teaching which has developed into a myth.” In response to Peters, an embattled cartography united to condemn all rectilinear world projections, an hysterical reaction that underscored the depth of the wound sustained from Peters’ critique of the profession’s epistemological foundations
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