This book comprises 17 chapters derived from new research papers presented at the 7th International Symposium of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography, held in Oxford from 13 to 15 September 2018 and jointly organized by the ICA Commission on Topographic Mapping and the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. The overall conference theme was 'Mapping Empires: Colonial Cartographies of Land and Sea'. The book presents a breadth of original research undertaken by internationally recognized authors in the field of historical cartography and offers a significant contribution to the development of this growing field and to many interdisciplinary aspects of geography, history and the geographic information sciences. It is intended for researchers, teachers, postgraduate students, map librarians and archivists.

The First Mapping of America tells the story of the General Survey. At the heart of the story lie the remarkable maps and the men who made them - the commanding and highly professional Samuel Holland, Surveyor-General in the North, and the brilliant but mercurial William Gerard De Brahm, Surveyor-General in the South. Battling both physical and political obstacles, Holland and De Brahm sought to establish their place in the firmament of the British hierarchy. Yet the reality in which they had to operate was largely controlled from afar, by Crown administrators in London and the colonies and by wealthy speculators, whose approval or opposition could make or break the best laid plans as they sought to use the Survey for their own ends.

The impacts of climate change are beginning to be felt throughout the world, yet there is no clear explanation as to how these changes will alter our future. The research being conducted within the geospatial science field is pivotal to understanding the effects the global environment is experiencing. The Handbook of Research on Geospatial Science and Technologies is an essential scholarly reference source that evaluates the current methodologies and trends in geospatial science, and how these insights provide society with more efficient and effective ways to manage natural resources. Featuring discussions on relevant topics such as cartography, geographical information systems, remotely sensed data, and sustainability management, this publication is an informative resource for all academicians, students, scientists, and researchers that are interested in emerging developments within geospatial science.

"Earthbound humans are unable to embrace more than a tiny part of the planetary surface. But in their imagination they can grasp the whole of the earth, as a surface or a solid body, to locate it within infinities of space and to communicate and share images of it."--from the Preface

Long before we had the ability to photograph the earth from space--to see our planet as it would be seen by the Greek god Apollo--images of the earth as a globe had captured popular imagination. In "Apollo's Eye, " geographer Denis Cosgrove examines the historical implications for the West of conceiving and representing the earth as a globe: a unified, spherical body. Cosgrove traces how ideas of globalism and globalization have shifted historically in relation to changing images of the earth, from antiquity to the Space Age. He connects the evolving image of a unified globe to politically powerful conceptions of human unity.

This book gathers various perspectives on modern map production. Its primary focus is on the new paradigm of "sharing and reuse," which is based on decentralized, service-oriented access to spatial data sources. Service-Oriented Mapping is one of the main paradigms used to embed big data and distributed sources in modern map production, without the need to own the sources. To be stable and reliable, this architecture requires specific frameworks, tools and procedures. In addition to the technological structures, organizational aspects and geographic information system (GIS) capabilities provide powerful tools to make modern geoinformation management successful. Addressing a range of aspects, including the implementation of the semantic web in geoinformatics, using big data for geospatial visualization, standardization initiatives, and the European spatial data infrastructure, the book offers a comprehensive introduction to decentralized map production. .

In the thirteenth century, Italian merchant and explorer Marco Polo traveled from Venice to the far reaches of Asia, a journey he chronicled in a narrative titled "Il Milione," later known as "The Travels of Marco Polo." While Polo's writings would go on to inspire the likes of Christopher Columbus, scholars have long debated their veracity. Some have argued that Polo never even reached China, while others believe that he came as far as the Americas. Now, there's new evidence for this historical puzzle: a very curious collection of fourteen little-known maps and related documents said to have belonged to the family of Marco Polo himself.
In "The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps," historian of cartography Benjamin B. Olshin offers the first credible book-length analysis of these artifacts, charting their course from obscure origins in the private collection of Italian-American immigrant Marcian Rossi in the 1930s; to investigations of their authenticity by the Library of Congress, J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBI; to the work of the late cartographic scholar Leo Bagrow; to Olshin's own efforts to track down and study the Rossi maps, all but one of which are in the possession of Rossi's great grandson Jeffrey Pendergraft. Are the maps forgeries, facsimiles, or modernized copies? Did Marco Polo's daughters--whose names appear on several of the artifacts--preserve in them geographic information about Asia first recorded by their father? Or did they inherit maps created by him? Did Marco Polo entrust the maps to Admiral Ruggero Sanseverino, who has links to Rossi's family line? Or, if the maps have no connection to Marco Polo, who made them, when, and why?
Regardless of the maps' provenance, Olshin's tale--stretching from the remote reaches of the northern Pacific to early Chinese legends--takes readers on a journey confounding yet fascinating, offering insights into Italian history, the age of exploration, and the wonders of cartography.

The book presents and discusses a large corpus of Jewish maps of the Holy Land that were drawn by Jewish scholars from the 11th to the 20th century, and thus fills a significant lacuna both in the history of cartography and in Jewish studies. The maps depict the biblical borders of the Holy Land, the allotments of the tribes, and the forty years of wanderings in the desert. Most of these maps are in Hebrew although there are several in Yiddish, Ladino and in European languages. The book focuses on four aspects: it presents an up-to-date corpus of known maps of various types and genres; it suggests a classification of these maps according to their source, shape and content; it presents and analyses the main topics that were depicted in the maps; and it puts the maps in their historical and cultural contexts, both within the Jewish world and the sphere of European cartography of their time. The book is an innovative contribution to the fields of history of cartography and Jewish studies. It is written for both professional readers and the general public. The Hebrew edition (2014), won the Izhak Ben-Zvi Prize.