This thesis examines the social and urban history of mapmaking in Edinburgh between c.1880 and c.1920 and argues that cartography, along with the associated printing and publishing industries in the city, provides an effective lens on broader urban concerns. The predominant focus of the archival research is on the family-run firm John Bartholomew & Co., internationally-renowned map publishers during the period. The central questions of the thesis relate to print, knowledge, space and place. The work is grounded, in particular, within urban history and the geography of the book. Chapters are structured around the 'lifecycle' of a map and a re-modelled version of Robert Darnton's 'communications circuit'. Map production can profitably be contextualised within late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Edinburgh. A taxonomy of the contemporary printing and publishing industries shows - following Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the 'field of cultural production' - that it is crucial to understand the economic, industrial and intellectual setting in which cartographers operated. In this respect, mapmaking is viewed as a fundamentally social process, a theme that continues into the factory, where technological developments are considered in the context of workers' experiences. The buildings and spaces in which mapmaking occurred take on epistemological significance: they reflect how ideas about city space were made and the related importance of local knowledge. Changes in the sites and conditions of cartographic production corresponded with the increasing organisation of space shown in maps and fire insurance plans such as those produced by the firm Charles E. Goad. Once maps left the premises, a geographical approach to understanding distribution advances links between production and consumption: the local conditions of their making influenced international, national and local sales networks. Throughout, the thesis emphasises the importance of understanding maps as socially constituted objects. This also allows for new insights into the purchasing, ownership and use of maps. Tracing specific instances of use shows that meaning was not solely shaped by cartographers but also by the ongoing interactions and interventions of owners or readers. Overall, the thesis shows that mapmaking was a continually developing way of understanding the city. This was true for cartographers, city officials, or insurers, each of whose increasingly detailed conception of urban space corresponded with more accurate production practices and the greater availability of printed cartographic material. Mapmaking was also part of a broader move towards the growing documentation of urban places. The forms of cartography examined in this thesis show how codified, empirical systems of knowledge came to occupy a privileged position in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century cities. In particular, mapmaking practices in Edinburgh changed not only how the urban was depicted, but also how city spaces were conceptualised and used.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 271-277).

Maps have longed been recognized as instruments of power and persuasion. With the recent proliferation of maps in the media and on the Internet has come an increasing desire among groups advocating for environmental and social change to have access to maps (the product) and mapping (the process) to more effectively promote their agendas. However, this is not as simple as it seems. Far from being neutral conduits of "truth," maps are constructed by a myriad of social interactions among heterogeneous actors (human and technical) that left unacknowledged can lead to an untapped potential of the power of maps. Adopting actor-network theory's (ANT) theoretical framework that accepts nonhuman entities as actors in the social, and its methodological protocols, this study contributes to the needed empirical evidence relating to the ways in which maps and mapping behave and function in society, particularly in the grassroots advocacy context and neighborhood scale, through a case study of the products, and thereby the process, of the Coalition for a Livable Future?s (CLF) Regional Equity Atlas four-year endeavor. The purpose of this study is to account for and expose the complexity of relations among data, technology, people, and organizations that underlie it and the ways in which these relations affected the atlas itself. Four interrelated themes emerge from this study. The first relates to CLF's contribution to equity mapping discourse including its participatory approach to equity mapping, its definition of equity, and the subsequent impacts of both of these things on the mapping process. The second relates more specifically to the contributions of the embedded ideologies that are integral to the GIS software that was used and the roles that they played. The third theme is the importance of process in community-based mapping projects and the recognition that they are social processes in the comprehensive sense that ANT theorists advocate. The fourth theme relates to how maps work, specifically, maps as maps versus the idea of maps.

A geograficidade social do território mostra as relações existenciais que são produzidas no espaço. Contudo, situações e dilemas da existência são quase improváveis de se ver nos mapas oficiais, pois seus critérios, tema e seleção só abarcam as informações que são importantes para a elite capitalista que os utiliza. Essa prática cartográfica, constituída por um processo de cima para baixo, não coloca a vida prática do cotidiano, especialmente das populações minoritárias, tradicionais e marginalizadas. Porém, nas últimas décadas, diferentes atores de comunidades, povos e populações tomaram os mapas para entender, mostrar e constituir um processo de rexistência contra os ideais capitalistas. Com apoio de instituições, tem se buscado colocar suas territorialidades, saberes e fazeres, em um outro modo de cartografar. Esse outro modo de cartografar abre a possibilidade de escutarmos esses atores não hegemônicos pelos seus mapeamentos. Dessa maneira, esses mapas trazem histórias riquíssimas que expressam situações e fatos não escritos/ditos. Partindo dessa conjectura, essa pesquisa buscou aplicar a metodologia co-labor-ativa não extrativista das narrativas cartográficas para mostrar a identidade e a relação histórico-territorial-cultural desses sujeitos invisíveis, esquecidos e marginalizados. Para tanto, se escolheu um grupo social que vem sofrendo com o processo de modernização do espaço, abarcado pelo capital colonizador, os agroextrativistas do babaçu, do distrito de Arajara, Barbalha, Ceará. Para alcançar isso valemo-nos da metodologia coparticipativa e das experiências de cartografia social, que se delinearam nos mapas mentais, trazendo dados espaciais sobre o processo e situações espaço-temporais do agroextrativismo do babaçu, nesse distrito. Consequentemente, a partir dessa metodologia a pesquisa conseguiu apresentar as r-existências da atividade, os dilemas, pensar situações e melhorias metodológicas para a cartografia e a comunidade. / The social geography of the territory shows the existential relations that are produced in space. However, situations and dilemmas of existence are almost unlikely to be seen on official maps, as their criteria, theme, and selection do not encompass the information that is important to the capitalist elite it uses. This cartographic practice, consisting of a process from top to bottom, does not put the practical life of daily life, especially of the minority populations, traditional and marginalized. However, in the last decades different actors of communities, peoples and populations have taken the maps to understand, to show and to constitute a process of rexistence against the capitalist ideals. With the support of institutions, it has been sought to place its territorialities, knowledge and actions, in another way of mapping. This other way of mapping opens the possibility of listening to these non-hegemonic actors for their mapping. In this way, these bring rich stories that express situations and facts not written / said. Based on this conjecture, this research sought to apply the non-extractivist co-labor-active methodology of cartographic narratives to show the identity and historical-territorial-cultural relationship of these invisible, forgotten and marginalized individuals. For this purpose, a social group that has been suffering from the process of modernization of space, encompassed by the colonizing capital, has been chosen, being agroextractivists of the babassu of the district of Arajara, Barbalha, Ceará. In order to achieve this it was based on the co-participatory methodology and the social cartography experiments, which were delineated in the mental maps, bringing spatial data about the process and spatio-temporal situations of the babaçu agroextractivism in that district. Consequently, from this methodology the research was able to present the r-existences of the activity, the dilemmas, to think situations and improvements methodologies for the cartography and the community.