Artificial reality - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 66

and the courses of rivers. 5 The shape of the physical world had not changed
but the world of man had, just as it has in the pictures drawn here (Figure 3.4).
Trade and conquest by sea became paramount and the images changed to reflect
this. How we saw our world changed as we changed our world and how we had
changed it then changed us.
As all the lands were overrun by the former seafaring people, their area had to
be subdivided and their actual size grew in importance. The shapes on the maps
changed again as land area was maintained at the expense of compass direction. 6
Oceans, now easily traversed, shrunk as they were cut out of the atlas. The
parcels of farm land to be settled, fought over and traded became more clearly
depicted. 7 The centres of the maps moved from Mecca and Jerusalem to Venice
and London as the centres of power moved, and the names were of dominions
rather than provinces. 8
The century became a time of air travel and world wars, of twenty-four-hour
money markets and starvation on continental scales. All this changed how we
viewed the world. Now the shape of the world is changing again, but to no single
accepted projection. There are numerous one-world projections, from those that
claim the peoples of the world are best represented by their land areas to those
in which distance represents the shortest paths of ballistic missiles.
The shape of our world has always been an artificial reality of the times,
whatever religious or scientific accuracy was claimed for it. We shape our world
for our own purposes, to see where we are ourselves and to see what each other
has. We are still imagining the abstract spaces to draw ourselves upon. They
have never been naturally given.

3.3 Area cartograms

A cartogram is a combination map and graph.

(Wilkie, 1976, p. 1)

5 'Maps prepared using these [equal population] transformations, however, from many points of
view are more realistic than the conventional maps used in geography' (Tobler, 1961, pp. 162 - 163).
6 'We need to recognize unequivocally that the map is a socially constituted image and our
definition of the artefact itself should reflect that recognition' (Harley, 1990, p. 6).
7 ' ... towns occupy spaces on the map - even allowing for cartographic convention - far in
excess of their sizes on the ground. Castle signs, too, signifying feudal rank and military might,
are sometimes larger than signs for villages, despite the lesser area they occupied on the ground'
(Harley, 1988, pp. 292 - 294).
8 A few pages on, however: 'Maps as an impersonal type of knowledge tend to “desocialise”
the territory they represent. They foster the notion of a socially empty space. The abstract quality
of the map, embodied as much in the lines of a fifteenth century Ptolemaic projection as in the
contemporary images of computer cartography, lessens the burden of conscience about people in
the landscape. Decisions about the exercise of power are removed from the realm of immediate
face-to-face contacts' (Harley, 1988, p. 303).