Article by Oliver Roeder: “…From childhood, maps present the wooden feel of permanence. A globe sits on the sideboard. A teacher yanks down a spooled world from above the chalkboard, year after year. Road atlases are forever wedged in seat-back pockets. But maps, of course, could always be changing. In the short term, buildings and roads are built. In the medium term, territory is conquered and nations fall and are founded. In the long term, rivers change course and glaciers melt and mountains rise. In this era of conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, the undoing of national and international orders, and technological upheaval, a change in maps appears to be accelerating.
The world is impossible to map perfectly — too detailed, too spherical, too much fractal coastline. A map is necessarily a model. In one direction, the model asymptotes to the one-to-one scale map from the Jorge Luis Borges story that literally covers the land, a map of the empire the size of the empire, which proves useless and is left in tatters across the desert. There is a limit in the other direction too, not map expanded to world, but world collapsed into map — pure abstraction on a phone screen, obscuring the real world outside, geodata for delivery companies and rideshare apps.
But if maps abstract the world, their makers demand and encourage a close association with it. There must eventually be a search for the literal ground truth. As the filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer once said, “You can’t simplify reality without understanding it first.” Cartography, in turn, informs interactions with the world…(More)”.
