While scholars have increasingly challenged the concept of cartographic 'objectivity', applications such as Google Earth, offering a seemingly omniscient view of the world, threaten a resurgence of the scientific positivism that has severely limited the scope of past scholarship. In the Information Age of the twenty-first century, with the development of digital mapping technologies, it would appear that this 'Apollonian dream' of cartography – to look down on the earth from above like the Greek god Apollo – has been fully realised (Cosgrove, 2003: 235). Its truth and greatness declared, we may circle all or part of it, pilgrims through the colour of a flat parchment, around which the heavens and the stars revolve. Offers divine intellect to human genius, as if it were by nature celestial, demonstrating how with true discipline, we can leap up within ourselves, without the aid of wings, so that we may view earth through an image marked on a parchment. Over five hundred years ago the humanist scholar Francesco Berlinghieri, in his introduction to Claudius Ptolemy's ancient text Geographia, declared that the map: Keywords: Cartography, history of science, mirror, theatre, GIS, Google Earth Introduction An acknowledgement of epistemological pluralism in maps is the most effective way for scholars to engage with historical cartography, reconstructing the ways in which maps construct, rather than reflect, their worlds. Ultimately, the article proposes that it is only by historicising the vision of the present as well as that of the past that we can extend our understanding. However, this article argues that digital mapping technologies, rather than being a transhistorical 'end-point' of cartographic development at which we have an omniscient and 'objective' view of the world, remain deeply embedded in the cultural context of the Information Age. While the postmodernist approach of 'critical cartography' has deconstructed and decentred these perspectives, recent developments in mapping technologies such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) appear to position the twenty-first-century observer above the cultural and intellectual restrictions that shaped past cartography. Oliver Hirst, Department of History, University of Warwick Abstractīy viewing the history of cartography through the lens of 'objectivity', scholars have constructed a retrospective narrative of increasing geographical accuracy and realism which has culminated in modern 'scientific' cartography.
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