Nature at a glance: Immersive maps from panoramic to digital

Abstract

This article offers a media archaeology of immersive world maps and astronomical models, focusing on walk-in terrestrial and celestial globes. Innovations in digitally interactive data visualization promise spectators new ways of extracting knowledge from complex information. But the outsized claims and expanded formats of emergent displays invoke the ambitions of earlier scientific spectacles such as the nineteenth-century Georama – a giant sphere whose interior was painted to model the surface of the globe. Comparing immersive and interactive models of earth and sky exposes changing assumptions about how nature is ordered, how aesthetic representation should recapitulate that order, and how a spectator might perceive and know not just a model but the construct of reality itself. This article discusses examples spanning almost two centuries, such as the Gottorp Globe, the Georama, Wyld’s Great Globe, the Celestial Globe of the 1900 Paris Exposition, the Atwood Sphere, the twin maps of Google Earth and Google Sky, and the Reality Deck 1.5 gigapixel display recently funded by the National Science Foundation at Stony Brook University.