Beautiful Geography: The Pictorial Maps of Ruth Taylor White

This paper explores the career of Ruth Taylor White, an American cartographic illustrator who published a significant number of pictorial maps from the 1920s into the 1940s. Taylor White’s ‘cartographs’ (as she called them) were characterized by her signature bobble-headed cartoon characters who romped through colourful, attractive landscapes. These visually rich and highly narrative maps simultaneously strove for accuracy and engaged in profound stereotyping with regard to culture, race, gender and class. They reveal not only the aesthetic and conceptual preferences of their maker but also the cultural biases of their middle-class, white American audience.     

“Follow the Tree Flowers”: Fugitive Mapping in Beloved

This article attempts to analyse mapping practices at the intersection of geography, black studies and literary studies, in order to reassess the political and pedagogical possibilities of mapping under late capitalism. I turn to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved to track black cartographic practices otherwise obscured or, as Katherine McKittrick writes, “rendered ungeographic”. The novel offers a hidden and unauthorised archive for the often clandestine geographic practices that make possible fugitivity from the mechanics of “slaveholding agro‐capitalism” and its ongoing legacy. As an unofficial archive of black geographic practice, Morrison’s novel might itself be thought of as a map: a contemporary mode of memorialising the depth of place, relation, and navigation—a depth no two‐dimensional map can accommodate. Finally, this article demonstrates the valuable interventions that black studies and black creative production can make within the subfields of critical cartography and critical geography.     

从引文分析看大陆华侨华人研究——基于CSSCI（1998-2005）的研究

以中国社会科学引文索引(CSSCI)为操作平台,以核心作者群的被引论著为样本,对样本篇数、篇次、作者、机构、地域分布、主题分布、年代分布等因素进行了引文分析和量化的描述,并从文献的角度对大陆华侨华人研究现状进行评估。结果表明:大陆华侨华人研究1993—2002年是高峰期,形成了以福建、北京、广东为主的核心作者群,高等院校仍是华侨华人研究的主要机构,研究主题以经济、社会、历史为主,学术论文的利用率不高,高水平的研究成果不多。华侨华人研究在学术界的整体影响力不大,某些不够科学和规范的引证态度和方法亟需改进。     

明清时期瑶族向西南边疆及越南、老挝的迁徙

本文对明清时期的瑶族向西南边疆及越南、老挝等东南亚国家的迁徙进行了探讨。认为明清时期,由于封建统治阶级的政治压迫和经济剥削,以及刀耕火种游耕生产方式、自然灾害等方面的原因,瑶族被迫从湖南及湘粤桂边界大规模向西南边疆及东南亚一带迁徙,并由此而引起瑶族人口和其文化中心的转移,形成新的文化特征,瑶族亦由此而成为跨境民族。     

To what extent can online mapping be decolonial? A journey throughout Indigenous cartography in Canada

In this paper, we describe and reflect upon our journey through Indigenous online mapping in Canada. This journey has been planned according to an academic goal: assessing the potential of online cartography for decolonial purposes. To reach this goal, we have followed methodological directions provided by Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith to review 18 Indigenous web-mapping sites across Canada. Supported by a series of ten interviews, this content analysis enabled us to sketch some of the contours of contemporary Indigenous cartography. On one hand, Indigenous communities largely control the data that are shared on these websites. They also partially control the way these data are represented through the mobilization of digital storytelling technologies that are better aligned with Indigenous ways of envisioning relationships to places than conventional maps. On the other hand, they do not have much control over the technological aspects of these projects, for which they remain heavily dependent on non-Indigenous partners. Throughout this journey, we noticed that women's voices remained marginal in most of these mapping projects, but we also identified evidence supporting the idea that these voices are starting to play a vital role in the on-going effort of decolonizing mapping processes.     

OpenStreetMap in Israel and Palestine – ‘Game changer’ or reproducer of contested cartographies?

In Israel and Palestine, map-making practices were always entangled with contradictive spatial identities and imbalanced power resources. Although an Israeli narrative has largely dominated the ‘cartographic battlefield’, the latest chapter of this story has not been written yet: collaborative forms of web 2.0 cartographies have restructured power relations in mapping practices and challenged traditional monopolies on map and spatial data production. Thus, we can expect web 2.0 cartographies to be a ‘game changer’ for cartography in Palestine and Israel. In this paper, I review this assumption with the popular example of OpenStreetMap (OSM). Following a mixed methods approach, I comparatively analyze the genesis of OSM in Israel and Palestine. Although nationalist motives do not play a significant role on either side, it turns out that the project is dominated by Israeli and international mappers, whereas Palestinians have hardly contributed to OSM. As a result, social fragmentations and imbalances between Israel and Palestine are largely reproduced through OSM data. Discussing the low involvement of Palestinians, I argue that OSM's ground truth paradigm might be a watershed for participation. Presumably, the project's data are less meaningful in some local contexts than in others. Moreover, the seemingly apolitical approach to map only ‘facts on the ground’ reaffirms present spatio-social order and thus the power relations behind it. Within a Palestinian narrative, however, many aspects of the factual material space might appear not as neutral physical objects but as results of suppression, in which case, any ‘accurate’ spatial representation, such as OSM, becomes objectionable.     

Europe's confused transmutation: the realignment of moral cartography in Juan de la Cosa's Mappa Mundi (1500)

Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the New World of the Americas entered the cartographic and moral consciousness of Europe. In the 1500 mappa mundi of Juan de la Cosa, navigator and map-maker, we see Europe as a hybrid moral entity, a transitional blend of the medieval and the modern at the crossroads between two mappings of Europe. This paper argues that the Juan De la Cosa map represents a blurred transition between map-making traditions and a mixed moral rhetoric of European identity. The De la Cosa map operates across two sets of imagined axes: held horizontally, the map is set to a Ptolemaic grid with Europe straddling the Prime Meridian, and yet when held vertically it presents a medieval moral continuum in which the Americas occupy an ascendant position, a verdant new Jerusalem in contrast to the Babylon of the Old World. Europe is both drawn to the centre of a new world order, and also pushed to the moral margins in an echo of the medieval mappa mundi still imperfectly resolved.     

10世纪前中国西北边疆发展的几个特点

10世纪前的中国西北边疆经历了开拓、稳定和演变等过程,构成了一个相对完整的发展阶段,边疆发展的各种形态与主要特点尽皆呈现。南农北牧既是西北边疆的基本经济形态,也是历史上中原农业王朝与北方游牧民族角逐态势延伸的主要依据;在作为边疆主体的中原或内地王朝、客体的西域地区和旁体的北方游牧民族等三个主要因素的共同作用下,西北边疆的政治地理范围时有伸缩,而多种统治体制并存、边疆问题与民族问题一体化等特点也贯穿于这一时期西北边疆发展的整个过程。     

How Was Edmond Halley’s Map of Magnetic Declination (1701) Constructed?

Edmond Halley made two scientific voyages in the Atlantic Ocean as captain of the HMS Paramore between 1698 and 1700. Following these voyages he published the first map showing lines of equal magnetic declination in 1701. Halley did not reveal how he constructed the map, however, and it remains unknown. In this study, a construction procedure is hypothesized that uses mathematical tools that were available in his day, namely arithmetical averages and Isaac Newton’s method of divided difference for fitting a polynomial curve to data. To enable his map construction, a method is suggested whereby Halley could have created new data to augment the situations where insufficient data were collected.     

The Agote Map of Hainan Island,China: A Case Study for Cultural Dialogue in Eighteenth-Century Cartography

The idea of cartography as an example of Western imposition or process of cultural transfer is one that has long fascinated scholars interested in the margins of empires. This article analyses the maps in the possession of Manuel Agote, a Spanish factor in Canton at the end of the eighteenth century. The focus is on the use made by Agote of a Chinese map of Hainan, together with the European maps available already in China for commercial interests, and the way this reflects the cultural dialogue that was operating among local and foreign cartographers engaged in similar European mapping activities in the region.