Cartographic Perspectives (E-Journal - North American Cartographic Information Society, NACIS)
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Dating Maps with Sir Francis Drake’s Route of Circumnavigation
No full textThis paper describes the nine sixteenth-century maps, texts, and globes that showed Sir Francis Drake’s route of circumnavigation of the world. It shows the relationships between these nine artifacts and suggests the year of disclosure for each. The oldest of these is the Whitehall map, which was the direct or indirect precursor of the Drake-Mellon map, the French-Drake Van Sype map, the Dutch-Drake map, and the Hondius Broadside map. Most world maps published between 1561 and 1588 have a huge bulge on the coast of Chile. However, eight of the maps discussed in this paper shrank the bulge and moved it to the southern tip of Chile, using updated information from Drake’s voyage
How Did Early Modern Scholars Study Early Maps?
No full textSkelton (1972), followed by Harley (1987), invented “the history of cartography” as a field of study with deep historical roots, giving the field an origin deep in the Renaissance, perhaps even in the Middle Ages. In doing so, Skelton imposed modern scholarly practices onto early modern scholarship, without regard for contemporary knowledge practices. This essay counters the invented tradition by exploring how early modern scholars engaged with maps from the contemporary past (“early maps”). It identifies three distinct sets of scholars whose variant agendas led them to work with early maps in markedly different ways. First, Classical historians used the Peutinger map and Ptolemy’s Geography to identify locations of ancient places to improve their comprehension of Classical texts. Second, some geographers wrote histories of voyages and travels that related past routes to contemporary maps, and others wrote historical narratives of the compilation of encyclopedic texts and maps of world and regional knowledge. (This analysis requires a reconceptualization of early modern “geography.”) Third, antiquaries opportunistically described and at times reproduced a variety of maps, charts, and plans that came to their attention, but without actively searching for early maps. Overall, this essay demonstrates that before 1775 there was neither a systematic approach taken to the study of early maps nor any hint of the core methodology that would be adopted by the first historiographical mode of map history as it developed after 1830
Review of The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been
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Ambient Occlusion for Terrain Shading
No full textAmbient occlusion is widely used in computer graphics to accentuate areas in a three-dimensional scene that are hidden from bright lighting. On maps, ambient occlusion adds spatial depth and nuanced texture to shaded relief images. Ambient occlusion images for maps can be calculated from digital elevation models using the Eduard relief shading application. This paper illustrates the use of ambient occlusion for cartographic terrain shading and introduces two extensions: (1) oriented ambient occlusion for modulation with a direction of illumination, and (2) reduced ambient occlusion for valley bottoms with consistent brightness