Cartographies of Travel and Navigation

Cartographies of Travel and Navigation brings together a series of essays by leading cartographic scholars, archivists and practitioners, all of which, in one way or another, deal with the issue of ‘wayfinding’. Surprisingly (to me anyway), the use of maps as means of getting from A to B is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is only with the advent of modern print technologies, new forms of transport, and, of course, our own increasing mobility that maps have been used in this way and have proliferated. As one of the first volumes to bring scholarship on this aspect of contemporary cartography together, it suggests that the study of wayfinding maps and, by extension, the study of wayfinding as a social and economic practice, are worthy topics of analysis in their own right. And a very good job it does, too. The essays are very varied in terms of their subject matter, ranging from Catherine DelanoSmith’s survey of early itinerary maps to Robert L French’s account of the evolution of sat navs, and are presented in a roughly chronological sequence by subject matter. All are extremely well written and are appropriately (if not lavishly) illustrated with examples of all manner of charts, itineraries, maps, and so on. The value of this book lies partly in the richness of its descriptive material and its historical scholarship. This is both very revealing—particularly for those, like myself, who are not cartographic historians—and very thought-provoking. Important as the empirical material is here—much of which was entirely new to me—it is this latter point that is most important. This is not a book filled with all that clever theoretical stuff that seems to adorn so much contemporary human geographical writing, often with so little effect (or should that be ‘affect’?). But it is a book that could and should stimulate a renewed theoretical interest in particular aspects of human spatial relations. The development of the wayfinding map is more than just a history of expedient and functional representations of a changing landscape but is an account of a fundamental change in the nature of spatial conceptualization, encounter, and construction. To give just one example, Jerry Musich’s account of 19thand 20th-century American rail travel cartography explores the ways in which the developing state followed the spread of the transport network. Railroads made possible the physical unification of the territory of the US but also represented it in particular ways both cartographically and conceptually. For this reason, inter-urban railroads were laid before the towns they connected had been built—America was on the move before it was even in existence. Beyond being an empirical analysis of the maps themselves, therefore, this book is an account of the social, political, economic, and literary trope of mobility central to the practical and conceptual development of modernism and ‘advanced’ capitalist state and industry. Not only is this trope constructed and spread through these maps, but it is written into both the historicized mythologies of the American ‘frontier’ (Jackson Turner 1920) and its many subsequent reappropriations by, for example, politicians seeking a modernist legitimacy or science fiction writers and film-makers remaking the frontier experience for current and future generations (cf. Abbott 2006). As such, this book adds an important empirical dimension to our understanding of the construction of what John Pickles (2004) describes as the ‘geo-coded world’. Whether this book will reach the wider audience it deserves remains to be seen—it is very much addressed to a specialist disciplinary audience, and my fear is that it may simply be labelled as ‘historical geography’ and be lost in one of the many intellectual silos that currently beset and undermine the discipline. Beyond Geography, however, this book would sit well alongside critical analyses of literary accounts of mobility (e.g. Dos Passos’ USA, de Lillo’s Underworld, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon). It could also make a major contribution to the development of anthropologies and ethnographies of current and future mobilities. It International Journal of Geographical Information Science Vol. 22, Nos. 11–12, November–December 2008, 1311–1312