Mapping new territories

Scale 1:1 and ‘grandeur nature’ representation

TJ — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 20:03:46 +0000

The starting point of this article is the famous Borges forgery style story “On Exactitude in Science” about the Empire’s map at scale 1:1. In How to Travel with a Salmon and other essays, Umberto Eco discusses this text in an hilarious way. Pretending to take Borges seriously, Eco considers all possible and even most astonishing solutions. He demonstrates : 1) that there is not any practical way to set up a map at scale 1:1 and 2) that a map at scale 1:1 is theoretically impossible.Umberto Eco main argument addresses the radical impossibility to get a perfect representation of the world. Any representation process has to deal with loss of reality. The representation requires that a distance remains between who is representing and what is represented.

As a matter of fact, neither Borges or Eco could take into account the fact that the problem changes drastically when we consider a 1:1 digital map. Most of Eco’s arguments about the practical possibility of the 1:1 scale map are ruined by the new geospatial technology. But Google Earth and Virtual Earth can be read as a sign of this incredible project of the maps at 1:1 scale, that Borges and Eco thought as a theoretical apory, a strange and troubling dream.

I attempt to address in this topic some social, politic and scientific questions about this race to the perfect representation of the world.

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San Francisco Digital Tour

TJ — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 18:15:43 +0000

An inventory of various digital ways to describe San Francisco.

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Connecting books and maps

TJ — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:27:17 +0000

An analysis of the way books are now related to maps through place names query tools. Example of Google Books.

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Inventory of Geospatial Applications Featured in ’24′

TJ — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:47:11 +0000

I attempt to inventory geospatial tools used in some seasons of the TV Serie 24.

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Alias vs ’24′

TJ — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 21:13:33 +0000

Comparative analysis of the way geospatial technologies are used in 2 differentTV series : 24 and Alias.

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