a new world order of maps

Timothy Erik Strom (Southern Cross): Space, Cyberspace and Interface: The Trouble with Google Maps. From Penn State, a series called the Geospatial Revolution Project. In the emerging field of “spatial humanities,” scholars are using mapmaking software to recreate vanished landscapes and envision history as it really happened. Mapmaking has a new challenge far more involved than depicting the traits of the physical world. A new world order of maps (Google and MapQuest) changes how we engage with cities. Creative Cartography: Here are 7 must-read books about maps. Restoring a 1770 map, found at the Brooklyn Historical Society, entailed boiling old books to get the right aged color. From Strange Maps, Fank Jacobs on Nazis up the Mississippi and other Axis invasion scenarios. From GeoJunk, while some artists use paint or charcoal, the artist Nikki Rosato prefers to make portraits of the human body using old road maps; and here is a brief history of maps. Ingenious Flat Earth Theory revealed in old map, with the Earth as an inverse toroid. From GeoCurrents, Martin W. Lewis on a key to map of geopolitical anomalies; delusional mapping: A review of The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen; and an article on microstates in cartograms. Maps with only words, known as “Typographic Maps”, are becoming increasingly popular (and more). Know your meme: “The World According to X” (a.k.a “How X Sees the World” or “The X World”) is a series of world map satires that are labeled with various geopolitical stereotypes and jokes to reflect the biased worldview of country X. Everybody, meet Kergolus: This little furry thing is a geo-mascot, shaped like the territory it symbolises. Mapping the human condition: What the empire of love has to do with the intellect forest and the bay of agoraphobia.

via bookforum.com

Muslim Representations of the Crusades

If, as August Nitschke argued, “groups can be understood most clearly when we ask: how do they look at their enemies?” then a good litmus test for Middle Eastem Islamic attitudes with regard to Western Christianity during the Middle Ages should be provided by the Crusades. Were they really that “great debate between East and West” that Edward Gibbon wrote about? When one begins to peruse the Islamic sources a paradox leaps immediately to the eyes: though the First Crusade was preceded by, generated, and was followed by a powerful outburst of religious enthusiasm (not to say frenzy) on the Christian side, among Muslims one encounters at first very little religious animosity towards the invaders, and certainly no corresponding religious resurgence. Panic, anguish, and hatred were indeed created by this forceful irruption into Syria- Palestine in 1097-1100, yet they lack an Islamic dimension. This is to be explained in part by the fact that the Crusades were viewed by the Syrians as an extension of Byzantine military campaigns aimed at the reconquest of Northern Syria in the tenth and eleventh centuries; campaigns which were on the whole (with one exception, the campaigns of Nicephoros Phocas and John Tzimisces in the third quarter of the tenth century) devoid of religious characteristics: a war between states, not between inimical religions. Such a perception was rendered plausible by the fact that the Crusaders came to Syria via Constantinople and that Western Europeans (Franks) had been known in the Middle East in the past, especially as mercenaries of the Byzantine Empire (p. ex. during the 1071 battle of Manzikert).

Click here to read this article from Verso Gerusalemme

MUSLIM REPRESENTATIONS OF THE CRUSADES - Medievalists Net

The mythological city

Still collecting interesting sites, book reviews, images, articles about city spaces, real and imagined, and citylit. Is it simple aggregation ot thoughtful research? Does it matter? Probably not.

Wendl's article addresses marking and reading cityspace, aka semiotics of the city ~ graffiti, advertising, signs and public arts ~ all ways of marking cityspace and leaving messages that not all will read the same way.

El Dorado imagined, minus advertising or graffiti: tabula rasa

"Whether it is prehistoric paintings on the walls of caves or the graffiti and advertising we see all over the walls of our modern cities, people need to mark out their space, distinguish it from the untamed wilderness. Peter Wendl asks why we still need to produce signs and icons in public spaces."

Urban Graffiti: imagining the authentic city

Read the article at Eurozine - The mythological city - Peter Wendl

The Lost City of Z

No, I haven't been to the Lost City of Z (or sworn to secrecy if I had), but it's a city, a mythic one at that. Besides, New York (and with it The New Yorker) is one of the places along ~ literally and literarily. The closing passage of the article, evoking "lo real maravilloso," is reminiscent of similar passages in both Carlos Fuentes' La Región Más Transparente (Where the Air is Clear, 1958) and Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps, 1953)

When he vanished, Fawcett and his party had been trying to uncover a lost civilization hidden in the Amazon, which Fawcett had named, simply, the City of Z. In the next seven decades, scores of explorers had tried and failed to retrace Fawcett’s path.... [until]

An archeologist named Michael Heckenberger was doing field work in the Kuikuro village....Because of the prevailing notion that the Amazon was a counterfeit paradise—and because no stone city had ever been found—most established archeologists had long ago abandoned the remote Xingu. “They assumed it was an archeological black hole,” Heckenberger told me. “Fawcett was probably the last person who came in here looking for lost cities."

Some of the musicians and dancers were circling through the plaza, and Heckenberger said that everywhere you looked in the Kuikuro village “you can see the past in the present.” I began to picture the flutists and dancers in one of the old plazas. I pictured them living in mound-shaped two-story houses, the houses not scattered but in endless rows, where women wove hammocks and baked with manioc flour, and where teen-age boys and girls were held in seclusion as they learned the rites of their ancestors. I pictured the dancers and singers crossing moats and passing through tall palisade fences, moving from one village to the next, along wide boulevards and bridges and causeways.

The musicians were coming closer to us, and Heckenberger said something about the flutes, but I could no longer hear his voice over the sounds. For a moment, I could see this vanished world as if it were right in front of me.

A Reporter at Large: The Lost City of Z : The New Yorker

From Troy and Rome on, falls, like foundings, of great cities are always the matter of myth no matter how real

a new way to look at cities

"Cities of the sky: From Dubai to Chongqing to Honduras, the Silk Road of the future is taking shape in urban developments based on airport hubs — welcome to the world of the 'aerotropolis' (and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more). A new way to look at cities: We can delight in the aesthetics of other necessities."

read the rest of a new way to look at cities - bookforum.com / omnivore