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also a tool for showing the results of scientific investigation,
as, in this case, with the local authorities to get the
contaminated water pumps shut down. Through this use of
thematic maps by engineers and doctors, it is both a concept
of science (through its status of evidence by the gaze) and of
a political concept (through a new type of governance based
on statistical information) that are folded in maps.
Before moving on to the study of digital maps, a look back
at the history of cartography enables us to highlight its
properties as intellectual technology. This notion underlines
both the relationship between the geographical format of the
information and the cognitive and intellectual work, but also
the ways in which maps can store and circulate information.
This double property has had various social functions in
history. In the 19th Century, under the combined influence
of industrialization and of the need for international
harmonization of the variables used in the emerging
statistical reasoning, the geographers' monopoly on maps
opened up so that other professions were able to use them.
Engineers and doctors have mobilized them and introduced
different “programs of action” [LAT 07], thereby altering and
enriching the possible applications and conceptions of the
map, as seen in Minard's work on graphic semiology.
Engineers used maps as a way of rationalizing urban
planning, and physicians used them as a way of rationalizing
medicine. Both contributed to the passage of maps from a
purely topographic abstraction
of the information to a
thematic one.
Are there similar developments in the move toward
digital mapping? What are the changes introduced by the
emergence of geographical information systems and what are
their consequences on cartographic practices, both in terms
of the properties of maps and in the professions that use
them? Finally, what relations exist between GIS and Web
maps? These are the questions we will answer in the next
chapter.
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