Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era ed. by Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer (review)

Time leaves dust on every map. If we agree that maps depict time over a limited arc, never in the same way, one arrives at a quandary of loose social constructionism or relativism for their study. Conceptually as tools, however, maps are not reducible to calendars or clocks, atlases or almanacs. Maps show traffic and movement, change over time. They do not fix a person or a country’s identity, or move time forward in a story of progress, mastery or conquest. Nor are they modern: maps are not all drawn to scale or with grids, not in the same manner. Time is a part of history, but history is just one variable. Time maps are constructs that represent the unstable; time can precede space; time can be out of place. Hence the nature of the book’s inquiry into symbolic design and representation. The aim of this beautifully produced volume, based on a 2017 conference at Stanford University’s David RumseyMap Center, is to offer a fresh digital-age approach to buried space-time propositions, assumptions, and frames for specific moments and cultures. Readers explore visually saturated “wheres” in which maps are temporal idioms, metaphors, and representations of an era and a place produced. The book curates time rhythms, often against the grain. Can one do serious forensic study of time in maps, without nostalgia for the artefact? Rather than separating an analog age from a twenty-first