Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era

by Kären Wigen (Editor), Caroline Winterer (Editor)

Maps organize us in space, but they also organize us in time. Looking around the world for the last five hundred years, Time in Maps shows that today’s digital maps are only the latest effort to insert a sense of time into the spatial medium of maps. Historians Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer have assembled leading scholars to consider how maps from all over the world have depicted time in ingenious and provocative ways.

Focusing on maps created in Spanish America, Europe, the United States, and Asia, these essays take us from the Aztecs documenting the founding of Tenochtitlan, to early modern Japanese reconstructing nostalgic landscapes before Western encroachments, to nineteenth-century Americans grappling with the new concept of deep time. The book also features a defense of traditional paper maps by digital mapmaker William Rankin. With more than one hundred color maps and illustrations, Time in Maps will draw the attention of anyone interested in cartographic history.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Maps, Geography

272 pages, Hardcover

Published November 20, 2020

Reviews

[The_J · Rating 3 out of 5]

Time in two dimensions cartography in the extreme

[Daniel]

Der Strom der Zeiten (1828)

[Scott Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a compilation of several academic papers that are tied to the subject with greater or less fidelity. So of course, some of the papers are better (four stars), and some less to (more like two).

[James S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Completely false advertising. Rather than a cohesive book, this is a random collection of highly academic articles from a conference at Stanford. Basically a conference pamphlet. A letdown.