In a Jorge Luis Borges story, cartographers created a map so meticulously detailed that its scale covered the entire empire. Yet, this ambitious map was ultimately deemed useless and left to the inclemency of the sun and winters.
"In the deserts of the west, still today, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars; in all the land there is no other relic of the disciplines of geography."
–Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science [1]
Think back to the colorful world map in your childhood classroom: countries in vivid hues, seamlessly pieced together, each defined by its own winding borders. It witnessed the first time you attempted to grasp the scale of a world beyond your home, school, and the corner store. Or think about the map app on your phone, where terrain and streets emerge at its slippy edge. Space is compressed, distorted, transformed, and projected, all beneath your fingertips. These abstract lines and shapes turn adventures into traceable paths, allowing you to set forth into a known world. But what exactly are maps, beyond the classroom wall hanging and the navigation apps we use daily?
To find out, the Fathom team visited the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, which houses over 250,000 geographic artifacts from the Boston Public Library’s collection. There, we encountered Boston as it was depicted by cartographers centuries ago, alongside hand-drawn renderings of the mysterious East Coast of North America.
One thing that struck me was the depiction of unexplored territories in early cartography. With some digging after the visit, I found the appearance of the famous phrase Hic sunt dracones (Here be dragons) on the so-called Lenox Globe, engraved in silver around 1510.
Until the end of the 18th century, Western maps of the African continent were crowded with kingdoms and fantastical creatures. With the rise of 19th-century imperialism and colonial expansion, they were suddenly emptied. The monsters, among any other possible traces of haziness and ambiguities, were eliminated by the overexposure of reality on paper by European cartographers[2]. Fast forward to the present, maps have become readily available products that have continually fractured our notions of the distant unknown. Dragons and monsters have since migrated; their former habitats have been laid bare by satellite imagery and overtaken by the restless traversal of Google Street View cars.
Alternative Perspectives and Modern Tools
While historical maps often sought to clarify territory and establish sovereignty, some modern maps offer alternative perspectives on the spaces we inhabit. We recently celebrated the birth of the new All Streets prints, featuring Katherine’s hometown Hong Kong and Mark’s second home Finland. It’s fascinating to see how these prints reveal an interesting blend of urban planning (or the lack thereof?), patterns of population density, and the resilience of natural landscapes against urban encroachment.
Beyond static prints, our data tool, Rowboat, allows us to interact with geographic data in real time. Take this Maritime Voyages demo dataset for example: you can explore the voyage trajectories of over 500 commercial ships rendered on a map instantly. The how-to is available in this guide written by our Rowboat power user Ellory, so I will spare the repetition here.
What is particularly interesting is how these latitude–longitude points behave on the map when you quickly move between various filtering stages. By hovering on the header chart with the option key held down, you can see relationships between data points that weren’t immediately obvious. In the video below, I held down Option and hovered over the histogram in the “speed” column:
In this visualization, you can see that ships moving at low speeds tend to stay close to the shore. As their speed increases, longer voyage paths begin to emerge. Many of these tracks span the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, while others run along the coasts of the Americas or loop around West Africa.
When you preview the “bearing” column, you can clearly see which routes and vessels run east–west and which ones connect north–south.
In his book Imagined Worlds, Freeman Dyson points out that we are caught between two kinds of upheaval: a concept-driven revolution that reshapes the familiar, and a tool-driven revolution that unearths new realities that we aren’t yet equipped to explain[3]. With modern technology, we find ourselves immersed in a landscape composed of scattered images that don’t just represent the world, but actively produce it. We need tools that not only show us where we are, but also reveal the undercurrents of power and movement that some tools were designed to hide.
References
[1] Borges, Jorge Luis. “On Exactitude in Science.” Los Anales de Buenos Aires, 1946.
[2] Jalón Oyarzun, Lucía. “Nightfaring & Invisible Maps: Of Maps Perceived, but not Drawn.” The Funambulist, July 2018. Link.
[3] Dyson, Freeman. Imagined Worlds. Harvard University Press, 1997.
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