When I was leading tours at my previous job at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington, I tried–through description and photographs–to give visitors a sense of what the late 19th-century neighborhood (today Judiciary Square and Chinatown) surrounding the original Adas Israel
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This week’s readings focused on the uses of GIS for the humanities. For this post I’d like to focus on what both Nate and Kirk also picked up on, and a point we discussed this summer in the new media minor field
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This week’s readings focused on maps that either creatively represent real life or that exist in fiction. You Are Here, edited by Katherine Harmon, shows excellent maps of imagination, imaginary places, and people’s personal perceptions of the world. It’s that last type
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Books Read This week’s readings are not as related to each other as past readings have been, due to outside circumstances preventing a meeting before now (thanks to Dr. Bristol for being understanding!). Nonetheless, the four do relate to a broad theme
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In previous weeks, we’ve read about maps helping to legitimate conquest of what they depict as blank space, of “terra nullius.” While all of this week’s readings have fascinating things to say, I found James R. Akerman’s “Twentieth-Century American Road Maps and
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This week’s readings focused on the ways that maps, consciously or unconsciously, create worlds–whether a view of the outside world for individuals with little mobility, as Penny L. Richards discusses; a fantasy world, as Diane Dillon discusses with regard to the Columbian
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From The Appendix journal, using modern technology to illuminate a 16-century indigenous map from Mexico.
In The Geographic Revolution in Early America, Martin Bruckner looks at the meanings that maps and geographic knowledge took, from surveys of the land in the 1690s to school textbooks promoting and naturalizing U.S. national expansion in the 1820s. While this book
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This week’s assignment for History & Cartography was to create, first, a hand-drawn map and, second, a map drawn on a computer. After much indecision, I chose to hand-draw a portion from an 1836 map of the town of San Antonio de
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While I greatly enjoyed Susan Schulten’s article “Mapping American History” in the edited volume Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, I couldn’t help but ask the question “Where are the Spaniards?” in the discussion of 18th and early 19th century maps
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