Mapping and Visualization

CARLA LOIS

The History of Cartography

The University of Chicago Press

Lugar: Chicago; Año: 2017;

Although the visualization of information through data mapping was not a specific or completely novel enterprise in the nineteenth century, the relationship between maps and visualization showed an important development, specialization and social importance. On the one hand, the increasing availability of statistical data, the development of visual and cartographic languages that occurred in line with the specific development of thematic cartography as an autonomous cartographic genre (and used not only in geography and cartography but also in more diverse disciplines, fields of knowledge and public administration), and the technological improvements in printing techniques that facilitated and reduced the printing costs of (carto) graphics generated conditions to strengthen the links between maps and visualization, or in other words, to instill the visualization of mapped data as a modern social practice that allowed a new level of understanding of the social, political, economic, demographic and statistical dynamics in societies that were undergoing strong processes of change and modernization. On the other hand, the use of maps with statistical information served multiple uses in nineteenth-century societies: from showing data to persuading audiences or creating identities to generating new aesthetics associated with scientific images. In other words, there was a double process: whereas the specialists generated and perfected graphic languages and ways of representing subjects in cartographic registers, societies naturalized these forms of representation as one of the communication, knowledge and learning strategies of data and ideas.