WINNER OF THE CANTEMIR PRIZE 2012 awarded by the Berendel Foundation The Map Reader brings together, for the first time, classic and hard-to-find articles on mapping. This book provides a wide-ranging and coherent edited compendium of key scholarly writing about the changing nature of cartography over the last half century. The editorial selection of fifty-four theoretical and thought provoking texts demonstrates how cartography works as a powerful representational form and explores how different mapping practices have been conceptualised in particular scholarly contexts. Themes covered include paradigms, politics, people, aesthetics and technology. Original interpretative essays set the literature into intellectual context within these themes. Excerpts are drawn from leading scholars and researchers in a range of cognate fields including: Cartography, Geography, Anthropology, Architecture, Engineering, Computer Science and Graphic Design. The Map Reader provides a new unique single source reference to the essential literature in the cartographic field: more than fifty specially edited excerpts from key, classic articles and monographs critical introductions by experienced experts in the field focused coverage of key mapping practices, techniques and ideas a valuable resource suited to a broad spectrum of researchers and students working in cartography and GIScience, geography, the social sciences, media studies, and visual arts full page colour illustrations of significant maps as provocative visual ‘think-pieces’ fully indexed, clearly structured and accessible ways into a fast changing field of cartographic research

Mappings explores what mapping has meant in the past and how its meanings have altered. How have maps and mapping served to order and represent physical, social and imaginative worlds? How has the practice of mapping shaped modern seeing and knowing? In what ways do contemporary changes in our experience of the world alter the meanings and practice of mapping, and vice versa? In their diverse expressions, maps and the representational processes of mapping have constructed the spaces of modernity since the early Renaissance. The map's spatial fixity, its capacity to frame, control and communicate knowledge through combining image and text, and cartography's increasing claims to scientific authority, make mapping at once an instrument and a metaphor for rational understanding of the world. Among the topics the authors investigate are projective and imaginative mappings; mappings of terraqueous spaces; mapping and localism at the 'chorographic' scale; and mapping as personal exploration. With essays by Jerry Brotton, Paul Carter, Michael Charlesworth, James Corner, Wystan Curnow, Christian Jacob, Luciana de Lima Martins, David Matless, Armand Mattelart, Lucia Nuti and Alessandro Scafi

In this heart-stopping novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author James Rollins, an elite team of ex-Special Forces soldiers turned scientific specialists must uncover a secret society and the treasure that could destroy the world. When a group of parishioners are burned to death in a German cathedral, the U.S. sends in the Sigma force. The tragedy is more than a case of arson; someone has stolen the priceless treasure stored in the cathedral’s golden reliquary: the bones of the Biblical Magi, the legendary Three Kings. Commander Logan Pierce, new to Sigma, will lead a team on the hunt for the Royal Dragon Court, a clandestine aristocratic fraternity of alchemists dating back to the Middle Ages, who seek to establish a New World Order using the mystical bones. The Sigma team will follow a labyrinth of clues leading from Europe’s gothic cathedrals, through the remnants of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, to a mystical place where science and religion will unite to unleash a threat not seen since the beginning of time itself.

Maps are beguilingly simple structures with deep and ubiquitous properties. They arise in an essential way in many areas of mathematics and mathematical physics, but require considerable time and computational effort to generate. Few collected drawings are available for reference, and little has been written, in book form, about their enumerative a

First book to describe a way of determining the best method to use to enable a robot to navigate.