Warping History: Analytical and Field Methods in Historical Geography: December 2012

" 'Amateur' field geographers can speak with authority about the clarifying effects on the mind of direct physical danger in the real world and there exists a terrible antagonism between field geographers and armchair academics. Not only do those in their armchairs think and write junk, obfuscation, obscurantism, and endlessly convoluted self-referral to their literature in windowless libraries, they do not care about the human condition.”

--William Bunge,
Geography is a Field Subject
Area, 1983

It is Bunge’s words that I remember when I am out in the field in places like Tunisia and Algeria.

I had read text after text of Martin Heidegger under the tutelage off one of the finest scholars it has ever been my privilege to meet. The philosopher Joseph Kockelmans always worked with parallel German and English texts, and with the Greek text too if it were appropriate, and slowly opened up the thinking that lay behind Heidegger's tenacious quest. If anyone had told me we would spend sixteen weeks on the forty-five pages of Heidegger's "Anaximander Fragment," I would have laughed, but at the age of forty seven, I began to read properly.
---Peter Gould, Becoming a Geographer

We picture facts to ourselves
A picture [map] presents a situation in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs.
A picture [map] is a model of reality.
A picture [map] is a fact.
A pictorial [cartographic] form is the possibility that things are related to one another in the same way as elements of a picture [cartographic objects].
That is how a picture [map] is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it. It is laid against reality like a measure.
Every picture [map] is at the same time a logical [mathematical][spatial] one. Not every picture is however a spatial one. [every map is].
It is as impossible to represent in language anything that contradicts logic as it is impossible to represent by its coordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space [projection], or to give coordinates of a point that does not exist. [void]

Reviews of The Naming of America

Imago Mundi:

....Hessler’s nuanced translation brings to life this dynamic period of cartographic history and the theories used by these early sixteenth-century cosmographers.His close attention to the Latin and his extensive notes reflect a level of serious scholarship that should place this book on the reading list for all graduate seminars focused on understanding the production of early modern knowledge. The presentation, graphic aesthetic and accessibility of the text will make this a favourite for general readers, as well, and should be on the wish list of everyone interested in early American history and cartography.

California Literary Review:

...It lurks in the background of our childhood imagination, now and again roaring back in adulthood to remind us of possibilities. A map of the world, that fixture in elementary classrooms, has always been a book masquerading as a flat piece of paper. Like layers of the earth for geologists, maps offer a glinting sample of the past. And when it comes to the Waldseemüller map, the Universalis Cosmographia that forms the subject of The Naming of America by John W. Hessler, there are earth-shattering discoveries to be found. Let it be said, up front, that The Naming of America is not a popular work in the vein of Doris Kearns Goodwin or Stephen Ambrose. Hessler’s is a scholarly affair, impeccably printed, where the footnotes are as long as the text, and controversies are discussed with dry impartiality....

We now look upon maps not only as stores for spatially ordered information, but also as a means for the graphical solution of certain spatial problems for which the mathematics proves to be intractable, and to produce the necessary spatial transformations for hypothesis testing....The modern geographer concieves of spatial structures and spatial processes as applying not only to such things as landforms....but also to social, economic, and cultural phenomena portraying not only conventional densities but other things such as field quantity potentials, probabilites, refractions etc etc. Always these conceptual patterns may be regarded as overlying the surface of the real earth and the geometrical and topological characteristics of these patterns, as tranformed mathematically or graphically, thus describe aspects of the geography of the real world...

---Spatial Order,
Harvard Papers in Theoretical Geography 1, 1967

We recognize yet another role for maps. In the solution of certain problems for which the mathematics, however elegantly stated, is intractable, graphical solutions are possible. This is especially true with regard to "existence theorems". There are many cases in which the graphical solution to a spatial problem turns out to be a map in the full geographical sense of the term, "map." Thus a map is a solution to the problem.

---Geography and an Existence Theorem,
Harvard Papers in Theoretical Geography 21, 1968

The basic ideas of the theory of convex sets are naturally and easily appreciated when examined in a geographical context, rather than in a non-spatial one...in this respect geography is truly elegant.

Maps showing regional classification can be regarded as logic diagrams. Mapping of sets is a general mathematical concept. Geographical mapping is merely a special case of this.

---'Some Literal and Elementary Notions About Geographic Regionalization and Venn Diagrams,'
Philosophy of Maps, 1967

Tobler's computer program, called Bi-dimensional Regression marks the real beginning of the mathematical analysis of historic maps. The paper was published in 1977 along with a Fortran program which performed an 'empirical transformation regressing an independent plane configuration against a similar configuration.' The program itself constructs this geometric transformation by estimating two sets of bivariate points on a square lattice that have been interpolated from the originally irregularly arranged original observations. This is very much analogous to modern landmark morphometrics using thin-plate splines and various other methods. The curvilinear regression coefficients are represented by Tobler as a spatially varying, but coordinate invariant, second-order tensor field...

Tobler's paper is geometrically insightful and, although being from the 1970's, still contains ideas that are yet to be fully explored in the study of the history of cartography.... Two-dimensional asymmetric tensor analysis for example... his work inspires everything I do....

The paper can be found at:
http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~tobler/publications
/pdf_docs/geog_analysis/Bi_Dim_Reg.pdf