Maps are one of the most basic (and informative) infographics. The simple map. A rectangle with a few lines, some labels, and an X can impart what it would take hundreds of words to describe. Maps are an abstraction of our world, a representation of space. At their most basic, they tell us where. If tweaked and tuned properly, they can tell us where, how, and even why. Maps tell us how places relate to each other as well as where things have gone, are going or will go. But mostly, maps tell us how to get places.
Lee McCormack, 'You Are Here: Maps 101'

Maps are, of course, one of the central metaphors and strategies in online navigation and resource location. It the imposition of the grid and, consequently, of XY coordinates that makes maps useful as a means of locating places.

The idea of representing the relative positions of geographic features as a drawing is extremely ancient, and appears to be as old or older than writing itself. A rock painting from Catal HyŸk in Turkey shows the plan of a village and has been carbon dated to 6200 B.C., while a map on a Sumerian clay tablet dates from about 2500 BC and shows mountains and a river. Today satellites and airplanes enable cartographers to make geographic maps of unprecedented accuracy and detail. ÊÊÊÊÊÊ The English word "map" comes from the Latin "mappa," or "napkin," because maps were often drawn on fabric. Cloth maps are cheap, light, durable, and easily stored -- advantages that applied both to ancient cloth navigational maps and to early 20th century silk aeronautical charts.

Redrawing with interpretation

In the beginning, maps were fiction. We perceived our world as myths defined by belief not geography. Maps of these imagined worlds came in many shapes and sizes, but they all mixed the unreal with snippets of the real world. The process of mapping the real world was one of going from geographies of ideas to maps of real geography. On the Internet, we will pursue a reverse path: maps of the Internet will progress from our current maps of network topologies to maps of virtual worlds that we build, maps of ideas and thoughts.

By Carl Malamud, 'A Shared reality'

The Greeks pioneered the field of theoretical geography, maps of the world as it ought to be. (A good example of theoretical geography can be found in Aristotle's classic work Meteorologica, Aristotle VII, Loeb Classical Library : No. 397.) The process of making the maps that we know today took 2,000 years.ÊÊÊ

Stylized maps were the rule, not the exception. In Asia, maps mixed stories of cosmology with travel times between villages. In Medieval Europe the term for a map was "mappa mundi," or "map of the world," sometimes also used to refer to the entire earth itself. This entered French as "mappemonde" and eventually became shortened to its present form of "map" as the meaning broadened to include any kind of graphic plan. Thus today a web site can have a "site map" that shows the virtual relationships between its elements, even though no physical objects are involved.

During the medieval period, maps were representations of concepts or experiences. For example. The TO map divided the world disc into three parts (Europe, Africa and the Orient) with Jerusalem in the center. By the Middle Ages, theoretical maps became highly stylized as mappa mundi, the classic ÒT-O" maps . Theoretical geographers saw the ocean as one large body surrounding the ÒO." The O was crossed with a T: the top of the letter symbolizing the Nile, the leg of the letter the Mediterranean. The land on the top was Asia; on the bottom left, Europe; on the bottom right, Africa. ÊÊÊ

Other medieval maps are essentially illustrated diaries -- recording a sequence of towns and churches on a pilgrimage route, for example, but not the distances between them or their geographical relationship to each other. These maps developed into the portalanos of the mariners and discoverers of the 14-15th centuries. The discovery of a manuscript copy of Ptolemy's Geographica in a Constantinople market in the late 14th century and its subsequent printed promulgation in the 15th century transformed both how individuals thought about geography and their ability to find and return to places.

 

Inherited from the past were the fables and legends of Greece and Rome, along with tales from Celtic and Norse mythology. These were blended with information brought back by occasional mariners, who, in expanding their trade routes, ventured a bit farther than any before them, or by chance came upon an unknown island when tempestuous weather blew their vessel off course. Gradually, this mixture of legend, speculation, and travelers' tales began to be replaced by a new kind of geographic knowledge, one that was the result of direct observation.
Donald S. Johnson

 

A map projection attempts to represent one reality in the context of another. In cartography, this means representing a round object, the earth, on a flat surface, paper. The most familiar projection is that of Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), a Flemish geographer. Mercator envisioned the spherical earth contained in a cylinder. He produced a map with a symmetrical grid in which the meridians are shown as parallel lines. Though it revolutionized cartography, Mercator's projection seriously distorts extreme latitudes; Greenland appears huge and Antarctica looks like a white elephant lying along the South Pole, which takes up the entire bottom edge of the map. In addition, on a Mercator map a straight line drawn between two points is often not the most direct route.

Projection by Stephanie Faul

 

also see:

McCormack, Lee, 'You Are Here: Maps 101' 2002