Mapping (Meaning and Explanation)

We explain what cartography is, its history, branches, elements and what it is used for. Additionally, digital and social cartography.

What is cartography?

cartography It is the branch of geography responsible for the graphic representation of a geographic area usually in two-dimensional and conventional terms. That is to say, cartography is the art and science of making, analyzing, studying and understanding all types of maps. By extension, it is also the set of maps and similar documents that exist.

Cartography is an ancient but current science. It tries to satisfy the human desire to visually represent the surface of planet Earth, a relatively difficult thing given that it is a geoid.

For this, this science resorts to a system of projections that attempts to serve as an equivalence between the sphere and the plane. Thus it constructs a visual equivalent of the contours of the earth's geography, its relief, its angles, all subject to a specific scale and a prior criterion, which chooses which things are important to represent and which are not.

History of cartography

Cartography was born with the human desire to explore and adventure, something that happened quite early in history: The first map in history dates back to 6,000 BC. c and consisted of a wall painting in Anatolia, in the ancient city of Çatal Hüyük.

Possibly the need to make maps was due to both the establishment of trade routes and the military planning of the conquest, since at that time there were no States with territory.

The first world map, that is, the first map of the entire world known to Western society from the 2nd century AD. c was the work of the Roman Claudius Ptolemy, perhaps obeying the desire of the proud Roman Empire to define its extensive borders.

On the other hand, during the Middle Ages, Arab cartography was the most developed in the world, as was China, which dates back to the 5th century. It is estimated that about 1,100 world maps survived the Middle Ages.

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The true explosion of cartography in the West came with the expansion of the first European empires between the 15th and 17th centuries. Initially, European cartographers copied ancient maps and used them as a basis for their own, until the invention of the compass, telescope and surveying allowed them to aim for greater accuracy.

Thus, the oldest globe, that is, the oldest surviving three-dimensional visual representation of the modern world, appeared in 1492 and was the work of Martín Behaim. The incorporation of America (with that name) occurred in 1507, and the first map with a graduated equator emerged in 1527.

Throughout this journey, the types of cartographic documents changed quite a bit in their essence. The first flat charts were made by hand and were used for navigation using the stars as a reference.

But they were soon displaced by the appearance of new graphic technologies, such as printing and lithography. In recent times The appearance of electronics and computing forever changed the way maps are made. Currently there are global positioning and satellite systems that offer much more accurate representations of the planet than they have ever been able to be.

Importance of cartography

Cartography is essential today. It is essential for all globalized activities such as international trade and mass intercontinental travel, as they require a minimal understanding of where things are in the world.

Since the dimensions of the globe are so large that it is impossible to contemplate it as a whole, cartography is the science that allows us the greatest possible approximations.

Branches of cartography

thematic cartography types — Thematic cartography analyzes only some aspects of geography.

Cartography comprises two large branches: general cartography and thematic cartography.

General cartography It deals with representations of the world of a broad nature, that is, aimed at all audiences and for informative use. The world maps, the national maps, are all from this specific branch.
Thematic cartography This branch, on the other hand, focuses its geographical representation on certain aspects, themes or specific specifications, such as economic, agricultural, military elements, etc. A map of the world's exploitation of sorghum, for example, belongs to this branch of cartography.

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What is cartography for?

As we said at the beginning, cartography has a great function: creating representations of our planet with varying degrees of accuracy, scale, and different approaches. It also deals with study, comparison and criticism of these maps and representations in order to be able to debate their strengths, weaknesses, objections and possible improvements.

After all, there is nothing natural about a map: it is an object of technological and cultural elaboration, an abstraction that human beings have developed, somewhat based on the way we imagine our planet.

Elements of cartography

Broadly speaking, cartography bases its representation tasks on a series of elements and concepts that allow it to accurately organize the different contents of a map according to a specific point of view and scale. Such cartographic elements are:

The scale Since the world is immensely large, to represent it visually we need to reduce the size of things in a conventional way, in order to maintain the proportions of things. Depending on the scale used, distances that are normally measured in kilometers will be measured in centimeters or millimeters, thus constructing an equivalence criterion.
The parallels The globe is cartographically divided into two sets of lines, the first of which are the parallels. If the planet is divided into two hemispheres starting from the equator, then the parallels are lines parallel to that imaginary horizontal axis, which section the globe into climatic stripes, starting from two other lines known as the tropics (cancer and capricorn).
The meridians The second set of lines that divide the terrestrial globe by convention, the meridians cross the parallels perpendicularly, the “axis” or central meridian (called “zero meridian” or “Greenwich meridian”) being the one that passes through the royal observatory of England in Greenwich, London, and which coincides in theory with the Earth's axis of rotation. From then on the world was divided into two halves, demarcated by a meridian every 30°, cutting the terrestrial sphere into a series of segments.
The coordinates By crossing parallels and meridians, a grid is achieved, and with it a coordinate system that allows assigning to any terrestrial point a latitude (determined by the parallels) and a longitude (determined by the meridians). Applying this theory is how global positioning systems work.
Cartographic symbols Maps have their own language, which allows elements of interest to be identified, based on a specific convention. Thus, for example, certain symbols are assigned to cities, others to capitals, others to ports and airports, etc.

Digital cartography

Since the emergence of the digital revolution at the end of the 20th century, there are few sciences that have escaped the need to use computing. In this context, digital cartography is the use of satellite and digital representations in the manufacture of maps.

The ancient techniques of drawing and printing on paper, therefore, are today the stuff of collectors and vintage. Even the simplest cell phones today have access to the Internet and therefore to digital maps. In them it is possible to enter enormous amounts of recoverable information and they also work interactively.

Social cartography It is a collective and participatory method of map making. It attempts to break with the cultural norms and preconceptions that traditional cartography brings with it, born according to subjective criteria regarding the center of the world, the importance of regions and other similar political criteria.

Thus, social cartography is born from the idea that there is no cartographic exercise devoid of community, and that the creation of maps must occur in the most horizontal way possible.

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