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The Power of Maps
Denis Wood
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Description for The Power of Maps
Paperback. A consideration of maps which evaluates the significance of the signs and myths which are inherent in them, and considers them as subjective depictions of reality rather than unbiased reference objects. Num Pages: 248 pages, b&w illustrations, maps. BIC Classification: PD; RGS; RGW. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 229 x 158 x 13. Weight in Grams: 358.
The author shows how maps are made to appear as unbiased reference objects, though they actually depict, like a photograph, a subjective point of view. He discusses the signs and myths inherent in maps and suggests ways to decode the interests implicit in their representation.
Product Details
Publisher
Guilford Publications United States
Place of Publication
New York, United States
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
About Denis Wood
Denis Wood, PhD, is an independent scholar living in Raleigh, North Carolina. He lectures widely and is the author of a dozen books and over 150 papers. From 1974 to 1996, he taught in the School of Design at North Carolina State University. In 1992, he curated the Power of Maps exhibition for the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design (remounted ... Read moreat the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, in 1994), for which he wrote the book The Power of Maps. His other books include Rethinking the Power of Maps; Making Maps, Third Edition (coauthored with John Krygier); and Weaponizing Maps (coauthored with Joe Bryan). Show Less
Reviews for The Power of Maps
If compelled to cite only a single book on cartography to stock a desert-island shelf or to assign to the eager novice, this is the automatic choice....Although I have been drawing and poring over maps, as well as reading about them, since childhood, I received more revelations about their essential nature and larger meanings from this one powerful, disturbing, totally ... Read moreconvincing essay than from all the other books, articles, and lectures on the subject I have ever encountered.''
Wilbur Zelinsky, The Pennsylvania State University Combining both topical issues relevant to lay readers and serious scholarship, Denis Wood's The Power of Maps will provoke, amuse, tweak, and inform anyone who has had occasion to use, or merely peruse, a map
which is to say, everyone. It is a relentless entertainment
relentlessly challenging to traditional assumptions about cartography, relentlessly witty as it deconstructs (read: demolishes) the pretense of neutral, `scientific' map-making, and relentlessly contrary in reminding us that maps reflect social choices and serve particular political interests.''
Stephen S. Hall, author of Mapping the Next Millennium Perhaps the simplest thing to say is that there is nothing quite like it! There are, of course, countless conventional accounts of cartography
usually a combination of the history of cartography and a catalogue of its technical achievements
but these are usually Whiggish tales which celebrate the progressive advance of cartography towards 'Truth.' Apart from a short discussion of so-called 'propaganda maps' (which is there simply to mark a departure from the norm, so to speak, an anomaly) these books rarely offer any sustained discussion of what one might call the cultural and political implications of maps and mapping. With the current explosion of interest in cultural politics and social theory, both inside and outside human geography, there is an obvious need for a discussion which resists those conventions. I can think of only Mark Monmonier's HOW TO LIE WITH MAPS
which from all accounts has done extremely well, but is narrower in scope than Wood's text
and the late Brian Harley's marvelous essays on deconstruction and mapping
which may well be too abstract for many readers. In any event, I have no doubt that Denis Wood's book will be a major contribution to this emerging discussion of the power and politics of maps and mapping: it is written in a clear and accessible style but none the less deals with some of the most complex issues in contemporary debates over power, knowledge and spatiality. It is immensely engaging: the examples and illustrations are to the point and by no means obvious, and the issues that are raised extend far beyond the confines of any purely academic discipline. This is one of those rare books that will prompt its readers to re-think some of their most taken-for-granted assumptions and the ways in which those conventions bear on their everyday lives.
Derek Gregory, The University of British Columbia Wood's enthusiastic and scholarly contribution to the history of geography, and specifically the history of mapping, is widely acknowledged. The Power of Maps...has been widely reviewed, routinely used in teaching the history of geographical knowledge and rarely goes without citation in scholarship on the geopolitics of maps.
Jane Jacobs in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Denis Wood's book The Power of Maps sheds a brilliant new light on our customary experience of maps....You will never look at any map the same way again.
The Christian Science Monitor ....The last word on maps.
The Trenton Times Show Less