This book gathers 22 papers which were presented at the 6th International Symposium of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography in Dubrovnik, Croatia on 13–15 October 2016. The overall conference theme was ‘The Dissemination of Cartographic Knowledge: Production – Trade – Consumption – Preservation’. The book presents original research by internationally respected authors in the field of historical cartography, offering a significant contribution to the development of this field of study, but also of geography, history and the GIS sciences. The primary target audience includes researchers, educators, postgraduate students, map librarians and archivists.

This study reproduces and describes, for the first time, all the maps of China printed in Europe between 1584 and 1735, unravelling the origin of each individual map, their different printing, issues and publication dates.

The Lower Danube—the stretch of Europe’s second longest river between the Romanian-Serbian border and the confluence to the Black Sea—was effectively transformed during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In describing this lengthy undertaking, Luminita Gatejel proposes that remaking two key stretches—the Iron Gates and the delta—not only physically altered the river but also redefined it in a legal and political sense. Since the late eighteenth century, military conflicts and peace treaties changed the nature of sovereignty over the area, as the expansionist tendencies of the Habsburg and British Empires encountered rival Ottoman and Russian imperial plans. The inconvenience that the river’s physical shape obstructed free navigation and the growth of commercial traffic, was an increasing concern to all parties. This book shows that alongside imperial aspirations, transnational actors like engineers, commissioners and entrepreneurs were the driving force behind the river regulation. In this highly original, deeply researched, and carefully crafted study, Gatejel explores the formation of international cooperation, the emergence of technical expertise and the emergence of engineering as a profession. This constellation turned the Lower Danube into a laboratory for experimenting with new forms of international cooperation, economic integration, and nature transformation.

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.

Object-Oriented Cartography provides an innovative perspective on the changing nature of maps and cartographic study. Through a renewed theoretical reading of contemporary cartography, this book acknowledges the shifted interest from cartographic representation to mapping practice and proposes an alternative consideration of the ‘thingness’ of maps. Rather than asking how maps map onto reality, it explores the possibilities of a speculative-realist map theory by bringing cartographic objects to the foreground. Through a pragmatic perspective, this book focuses on both digital and nondigital maps and establishes an unprecedented dialogue between the field of map studies and object-oriented ontology. This dialogue is carried out through a series of reflections and case studies involving aesthetics and technology, ethnography and image theory, and narrative and photography. Proposing methods to further develop this kind of cartographic research, this book will be invaluable reading for researchers and graduate students in the fields of Cartography and Geohumanities.

From the 17th century onwards, in a context of increasingly intense trade and diplomatic contacts, the exchange of scientific ideas became a key element in the encounters between the European world and the cultures of the Far East. This volume investigates the ways in which scientific knowledge was transferred and disseminated to new audiences, whose cultural background was very different from that in which such knowledge had originally developed. A vital role in this process was played by the Jesuit mission in China, whose members included intellectuals with a keen interest in cross-cultural comparison. The study of the local languages enabled the transfer of knowledge in both directions, through translations of existing texts and the production of new ones for both Chinese and European audiences. The papers in the volume, authored by specialists in various fields of cultural studies, highlight the intellectual effort and strategies by which scientific works were made available and understandable beyond cultural differences. The volume will be welcome to those interested not only in cultural interactions between Europe and the Far East, but also in translation studies, particularly in the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

It was a simple announcement on a summer day. It appeared to be a straightforward proposal to solve a serious problem. Constrained by a statutory requirement for self-funding and facing a new paradigm in information dissemination, the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) was failing. As federal agencies distributed reports at no cost on the World Wide Web-- reports that formerly NTIS had distributed--NTIS was unable to collect revenue sufficient to cover its costs of cataloging and maintaining its collection. The proposal put forth in August 1999 by the Department of Commerce (where NTIS is organizationally located) was to close NTIS and move its collections and functions to the Library of Congress. The National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) immediately recognized this proposal to be far more significant than it first appeared. Fundamental issues regarding how the government used, disseminated and valued its information resources were at stake. The Commission stepped forward and prepared a preliminary assessment of the proposed closure of NTIS, which it delivered to the President and Congress. This report recommended a number of steps to keep NTIS operational, but it also stated that a much broader assessment of the underlying issues involved in public information dissemination throughout government was needed.

While Asian and Western cartographies are often considered separate traditions, maps of Japan kept in Leiden University Libraries often show a commonality of method and purpose. Despite the expulsion of Phillip Franz von Siebold from Japan in 1829, the norm was for friendly exchanges of scientific knowledge. One of the highlights of this volume are annotated drafts and proofs of Siebold’s map of Japan, published and discussed for the first time alongside Japanese source maps. Five essays by worldwide experts in the history of cartography and of Dutch-Japanese relations accompany extensive catalogue entries for over fifty maps. Contributors are: Aoyama Hiro’o, Edward Boyle, Radu Leca, Martijn Storms, and Uesugi Kazuhiro.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has seen the emergence of its unprecedentedly comprehensive global secret military mapping project and the commercial availability of a vast number of detailed topographic maps and city plans at several scales. This thesis provides an in-depth examination of the series of over 2,000 large-scale city plans produced in secret by the Military Topographic Directorate (Военное топографическое управление) of the General Staff between the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. After positioning the series in its historical context, the nature and content of the plans are examined in detail. A poststructuralist perspective introduces possibilities to utilise and apply the maps in new contexts, which this thesis facilitates by providing a systematic, empirical analysis of the Soviet map symbology at 1:10,000 and 1:25,000, using new translations of production manuals and a sample of the city plans. A comparative analysis with the current OpenStreetMap symbology indicates scope for Soviet mapping to be used as a valuable supplementary topographic resource in a variety of existing and future global mapping initiatives, including humanitarian crisis mapping. This leads to a conclusion that the relevance and value of Soviet military maps endure in modern applications, both as a source of data and as a means of overcoming contemporary cartographic challenges relating to symbology, design and the handling of large datasets.