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They're being transformed by 21st century technology. In the past, it could take hundreds of years to make a map. Now, photoreal digital images can be made in hours and updated every week to create a virtual world of maps. They seem to present a completely accurate objective image of the world, the triumphant culmination of thousands of years of map-making. But from the Christian vision of the Middle Ages to the elaborate symbolism of the Aztecs and from the Victorian obsession with statistics to Nazi propaganda history reveals that maps are shaped by the beliefs, rituals, and prejudices of the people who make them.
Maps have always done more than just accurately represent the world, and that's what really excites me about them. They are unique windows onto past ages full of passions and anxieties of the people that made them. And if we scratch beneath their surface, we begin to understand how different cultures, different societies have used those maps to define their faith, to understand their environment, to impose order and structure on their teeming chaotic worlds. The 9th of October, 1943. Allied bombers above Hanover destroyed much of the city, including the state archives. In the basement was one of the world's most precious medieval treasures, the Ebstorf map.
The Nazis had just ordered its removal to safety but it was too late. This rare insight into the medieval mind was lost in the rubble. The Ebstorf map was made at the end of the 13th century by the nuns of Ebstorf Abbey in northern Germany. Most medieval maps in Europe were made by religious orders. They were the intellectual elite and they also had the resources to create these wonderful works of art. Fortunately, the nuns had photographs of the original Ebstorf map. So, after the war, they were able to make a magnificent copy of their lost treasure.
I have been looking at reproductions in books of this map for years, but to actually see it here, what, 10 ft tall, is absolutely breathtaking. It's a spectacular map. It's not really a map as we understand it in modern terms. It's a kind of vast encyclopedia of everything that was known to 13th century Europeans. It's totally unrecognizable to us as we look at it now, but if you start to dig a bit deeper, it starts to make some kind of sense.
This is a map of three continents. Asia sits at the top, that entire top half of the map. Africa is right over here, running right down from here. There is Africa right down the coast. And tucked in here in the bottom left-hand corner is Europa. There's Anglia, England, down here. But this is also a map of what is unknown to the 13th century mind. Looking again at the edges of the map, you start to see these rather monstrous figures, Gog and Magog, these two fearful creatures, cannibals, monstrous figures eating human flesh. Also on the margins the Massagetae, children who eat their parents. And if you go back over to this side into Africa, again, the limits of the map, more monstrous races. Starts with animals, sort of griffin-like figures,
snakes strange half-human, half-animal creatures here. Figures with no eyes, with no heads, creatures with no arms, and it becomes more and more monstrous as you run up the African coast. But there are also more familiar local features on the map. Northern Germany is shown with its rivers and its towns. And the Ebstorf Abbey is clearly marked, too. The charter is here. The map comes from and was created here in Ebstorf. And it belongs here. It's ours and it's something we're very proud of. What are your favorite images on the map? I particularly love the representation of paradise.
Right next to the head of Jesus Christ. It is an enchanting depiction. Adam and Eve have both got an apple. That is a sign for equal rights. And the snake winds down. The snake is fantastic because it's not a feminine snake, but a masculine one with a beard. In the 13th century, the majority of people were illiterate. They had to rely on pictures. I think our map used to be of great importance to communicate to people. And to confirm ideas. The Ebstorf map is a magnificent display of knowledge. It was used by the nuns as a spiritual guide to present the Christian vision of the world.
This is clearly not about geography in the modern sense of the term. This is a map about faith. And if you look at the center of the map, all its locations are biblical ones. You can see Galilee here. You have Bethlehem with its little star there. You can see Noah's Ark up here, something there. You can see the Tower of Babel rising up there. It's telling a very specific story about the Christian faith and its forms of belief. And right at the center of the map is Jerusalem.
It's at the absolute heart of the map and within its walled city, an image of the resurrected Christ. This is an image that puts Christianity right at the heart of the entire known world. But there's also a hidden message lying at the heart of this map. The viewer is being asked to think beyond earthly delights and think about heaven, think about the next world that they're heading to. And you can see this in the whole sweep of the map. At the top, the head of Christ, to the right and the left, his hands, and at the bottom, his little feet poking out. This is a world defined by Christ.
Christ is the world and he's embracing it in a big theological bear hug. Medieval Christian maps weren't really about defining territory. They weren't really even interested in getting from A to B. Their interest was getting people to focus on a higher spiritual realm, on rising up above the Earth and reaching up to heaven. 200 years later, the ancient Aztecs were also using maps to convey information about their own rituals and beliefs. They give us a rare insight into one of the great empires of Central America. One of their maps is part of a book called the Codex Mendoza which describes Aztec life and rituals.
It was created by an Aztec artist in the 1540s. At first sight, it doesn't look like a map at all. To Western eyes, this image is almost completely alien, but that's because the Aztecs had a very different conception of space to us. This is in fact a city map. It shows the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan on the current site of Mexico City. The city was built on a vast swamp and you can see the canals which run in this big blue X right through its center. And also up here, you can see the main temple to the gods. But down here, there's also a rather chilling reminder of the Aztecs' obsession with blood sacrifice. This is a skull rack and sure enough there is the skull of a defeated enemy.
The map is full of symbolic information about Aztec society. The eagle sitting on a cactus on the rock is a reference to the city's foundation myth. It was said that the gods had sent the eagle to mark the spot where the Aztecs were to build their capital. It remains the national symbol of Mexico. Beneath the eagle is a shield with seven feathers and a bundle of spears which symbolize the authority of the Aztec lords. And beneath the city are triumphal images of two Aztec military victories. But by the time this map was made, the
Aztec empire had been conquered and colonized by the Spanish. The map was commissioned by the Spanish governor Antonio Mendoza as a gift for the king of Spain. Aztec artists were employed to create the map to show off the king's new territories and subjects. So what were the native artists trying to tell him? The key to understanding this map lies in these male figures all across the city. And what they represent is its rulers, its elders. And this incredibly important figure down here is the priest ruler. You can tell it's him because
he's larger than everybody else. He's also painted in black body paint. But surrounding him are these other male figures who represent the rulers of particular zones or neighborhoods of the city. Because this is a map about hierarchy. It's about a deeply structured society which wants to map its city around these kind of issues rather than where the canals run or how the streets cut across the city. Because that's the nature of Aztec society, top-down, deeply structured, utterly hierarchical. The native artists who drew this map were making a record of the glories of the old Aztec empire. It's a defiant celebration of its power structures, its rituals, and its beliefs.
The map is a record of a mighty empire conquered by the Spaniards. But it's also a really poignant image of everything that the Aztecs had lost. While the Aztecs were drawing symbolic images commemorating their own lost empire, Europeans were making ever more accurate maps to help them understand their newly conquered territories. And maps were starting to look more like the ones we used to navigate the world today. But even as they became more accurate, they were still revealing the beliefs and prejudices of the age. The British were increasingly curious about the inhabitants of Britain's far-flung dominions. And in the 19th century, maps were popular source of information.
Some of London's most fashionable maps were made by a prolific cartographer called James Wild. Wild specialized in world atlases, but in 1815 he made this elaborate map which he called a chart of the world showing the religion, population, and civilization of each country. It was an ambitious attempt to catalog all the available statistics about the population of the world. Wild even used a color code to show the dominant religions in each part of the world. Protestantism was green. Catholicism was red.
Jews were black. Atheism was brown and idolatry was a rather sickly yellow. In the key to Wild's map, he describes all the different religious denominations, Christians, Muslims. And then he gets into some rather wonderful descriptions of idolatry which he says is absence, feigned or sincere, of religion, which is apparently 153 million people. He also has atheism which he describes as a state of absolute ignorance. And there are apparently 30 million people who subscribe to that belief. And you can see this being reproduced across the surface of the map. And down here in the South Seas, you get lovely descriptions of Fijians, cannibals.
Down in New Zealand, cannibals. More cannibals. And yet more cannibals. In the Atlantic Ocean, a tribe called the Jaggas and their chief worship consists in frequent sacrifices of human victims, particularly children. Wild's map was made at a time when Britain's imperial forces were spreading through India, Sri Lanka, and Southern Africa. He used his map to satisfy his readers' curiosity and confirm their worst fears about these unfamiliar native peoples. There's even a scale to show how civilized each nation is which is in Roman numerals from one to five. One is
absolutely uncivilized and five is very civilized. Um no surprise, England gets top marks, gets a five. So does France. But you look across the rest of the map and sadly the Hair Indians up in Canada only score a miserable one as do the Copper Indians and so sadly do the cannibals down in the South Seas only coming in with a miserable one. Wild's map was an attempt to reassure his readers that Britain and the British were at the pinnacle of civilization. It's really an expression of British fears, prejudices, but also anxieties about how to govern non-Christian alien peoples that were now coming into the sway of the empire. In 19th century Britain, the drive to gather statistics about the
rapidly rising population at home was also gathering pace and efficiency. And maps were becoming powerful tools that could be used to identify social problems and even save lives. In 1831, a mapmaker came to the rescue when thousands of people across the country suddenly started dying of a mysterious disease. Maybe you'd wake up and there would be 10% of your neighbors would be dead. Um and that would be horrific when you didn't have any idea what was going on. And it meant that a lot of people would just move, which is pack up their stuff and leave to try and get away from this um very, very quick death. Victims arrived in agony, their muscles continuously spasming. Once infected, they could die within hours. Nobody knew what was causing the spread of the
disease or how it could be stopped. Once the outbreak had ended, over 32,000 people had lost their lives and they called it the blue death. It was Britain's first cholera epidemic. As it swept across the country, an apprentice surgeon called John Snow was struggling to save the lives of infected patients. Snow felt helpless as he watched victim after victim die. But he was already beginning to develop an idea about what was causing the deadly disease.
The scientists of the time were baffled. Most of them thought that the disease was spread by a miasma of infected air. But John Snow believed that it was caused by tiny microorganisms invisible to the eye and he suspected that the sewers were contaminating the drinking water and spreading the disease. When another cholera epidemic hit Britain, Snow examined water samples from the drinking supply of a cluster of victims in South London. He found they were all contaminated by raw sewage. This was the breakthrough. In 1849, he published an outline of his theory to explain the transmission of the disease. But nobody took him seriously.
Why didn't Snow manage to persuade people of his theory? Everyone believed that diseases were spread through bad air. And it was just so strongly believed, it was a bit like, I guess you can compare it to Darwin's theory of evolution. It was so radical, so ahead of its time that people just struggled to see, um believe that this was true. To prove his theory and convince people to take him seriously, the doctor turned into a mapmaker. When cholera broke out again here in Soho, Snow seized the opportunity to prove his theories once and for all. He walked around marking the deaths on a street map house by house, and sure enough, a pattern quickly emerged. He realized that people who were drinking
from the water pump on Broad Street were dying. Snow's map plotted the deadly progress of the epidemic. And the cluster of deaths around the water pumps seemed to confirm his theory. He was so excited by this extraordinary breakthrough that he rushed into a meeting the parish guardians and demanded that they immediately take the handle off the water pump to stop the local residents from killing themselves. The parish guardians weren't convinced by the vital connection revealed by Snow's map. But after the deaths of 600 people in the parish, they were prepared to try anything.
How do you think that Snow exploits the power of the map? It was definitely a almost a PR technique um of getting information, of getting a theory across. Um and we still use that very much today in terms of talking to policy makers, talking to people about what's going on, and showing them it visually on a map is a very nice way, a very friendly, perhaps unthreatening way of getting something that's quite scientific across. Thanks to John Snow's pioneering work, maps are now a powerful weapon in the battle against disease. So, what kind of things are epidemiologists looking at today?
Um it's very similar to the entire history of um public health mapping. It's whatever is the biggest public concern at the time. So, in Snow's time, cholera was the big issue. And now we're working on the things which are in the news of public interest. And with lots of public health studies looking around for climate change, one of them would be looking at malaria and how malaria may spread if the climate changes as some predictions suggest. Would it come back into Europe, for instance? As the industrial cities of Britain expanded, wealthy Victorians felt threatened by the ever-growing ranks of the poor.
Maps became tools for understanding poverty as well as disease. How did the Victorians view poverty in this period? They viewed it, I suppose, as one of the most major problems of the time, the poverty question. What do we do with the masses of urban poor that had arrived and settled in the city during the previous decades of the century. That was seen as a major concern for people. The poverty question inspired a wealthy industrialist to create one of the most sophisticated mapping projects of the Victorian age.
His name was Charles Booth. Booth was inspired to act when he heard the claim that 25% of Londoners were living in poverty. Booth was skeptical, but he was also curious. He decided to fund a team of researchers to do a thorough assessment of levels of poverty throughout the city. All the information would be carefully charted in a series of street maps. The project would continue for 17 years. Charles Booth was an unlikely man to try and map London's poverty. He'd made a vast fortune in animal skins on the
docks of Liverpool, but the tanneries were terrified by his visits as he probed and cataloged every inch of his thriving empire. And it was a habit that would stay with him for the rest of his life. Booth's hunger for statistics was fed by a team of investigators. From hundreds of interviews and observations, his team created a series of color-coded maps that showed the income levels and social classes of every street in London. This is one of Booth's maps, and it shows Limehouse, one of the poorest districts in London at the time. Yellow on Booth's maps denoted wealthy areas. Pink and red were the middle classes. Blue and black were the poorest. And there's absolutely no
yellow on this map whatsoever. Booth often joined his researchers as they spread out through the streets of London gathering information on wages, working conditions, and what Booth called social and moral influences. This wouldn't be just a map. It would be an intimate social profile of the city. Booth even lived with some of the families himself, and he recorded his feelings in his notebooks. He wrote about those living just above the poverty line that the children have when young less chance of surviving than those of the rich, but I certainly think their lives are happier.
They're more likely to suffer from spoiling than harshness, for they are made much of, being commonly the pride of their mother and the delight of their father's heart. One interesting aspect of uh Booth's work is that prior to Booth, poverty was seen very much as a morality problem. And one of the things that he showed was that poverty was not so much a problem of drunkenness or unwillingness to work. That was a very, very small part. He saw poverty as being a complex problem and needed to be therefore addressed through a whole variety of sources of information.
[bell] Booth's researchers scoured these streets making decisions about how they color-coded the streets. The kind of information that they were feeding back into the maps were contained in these extraordinary notebooks where they wrote down every encounter in every single street. And they make for fascinating reading to discover not only who they were encountering and what they were seeing, but how that fed back into the maps. Here's one entry. It says, "Rich Street, Jamaica Place, and Gill Street are a nest of brothels frequented by common seamen of every nationality." Another, "This is a noted thieves resort at Nightingale Lane."
"I knocked at the door of number 13 Jamaica Street. There were a man and a wife, and they kept an opium den." So, what is it that Booth's maps reveal? Well, for me, what's really interesting is that it reveals that poverty is spread out throughout the city. So, you have pockets of poverty very, very close to areas of great prosperity. It's showing that even if you were living in the West End of London, for example, you weren't that far away from situations of severe poverty. Poverty is just specs of black and dark blue within a sea of much warmer colors of relative prosperity. This is something that we
can manage, that we can get to grips with, that we can handle. Booth's extraordinary project provided graphic evidence that helped prompt housing legislation to improve living conditions in Victorian Britain. It also fueled a campaign to introduce an old-age pension to alleviate poverty. Booth's maps revealed that more than a third of all Londoners were living in poverty, an awful statistic. But somehow, by putting the problem on a map, Booth made it more manageable. It seemed less terrifying. And his maps also convinced Victorian society that something had to be done to help the poor. In the 20th century, statistical mapping was firmly established as a powerful tool of government.
In 1940, these ordinary American citizens had no idea they were being watched. Over 4,000 miles away, someone was counting them and plotting them on a statistical map. And this was the result. A map of America seemingly rather innocuous with neat little pie charts showing the percentage of European immigrants in each state and the countries down here that they came from. This is also a classified map. It says up here in the corner, "For official eyes only." This was a map that was made by the Nazis. The map was part of a secret mission to flood America with Nazi propaganda. By 1940, Hitler had already invaded much of Europe.
Britain was next on the list. The British were desperately trying to persuade the Americans to join the war against Nazi Germany. But President Roosevelt was reluctant to act. There is no demand for sending an American expeditionary force outside our own border. There is no intention by any member of your government to send such a force. You can therefore nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth. The Nazis were determined to bolster Roosevelt's resolve to remain neutral. And they were leaving nothing to chance.
Using statistics from the latest American census, they were drawing up a map that pinpointed the biggest communities of German immigrants living in the United States. The large red segments in these little pie charts identified the best targets for propaganda. The map revealed that the Nazis should focus their efforts in the rural communities of Missouri, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Texas. This was where public opinion could be most easily manipulated to oppose American intervention in Europe. In 1940, this dry statistical map was actually a weapon of war.
Maps are incredibly powerful objects. They touch the mind, but they also touch the soul. They magically conjure up places that we've never even seen. And it's that power which leads them to being exploited or even perverted. The Nazis were masters of mass manipulation. But they weren't just using statistical maps as weapons of propaganda. In occupied Europe, they were also using them as tools of terror. This is a map of Slovakia from the Second World War, showing the population figures for the local towns and villages. But this is also a really sinister map, because the Z's marked here show Romani Gypsy communities. And the
black dots here, here, here, and here show the local Jewish population. The maps were drawn up in 1941 by a Nazi expert in ethnography. The Nazis passed them on to the president of the Slovakian puppet government, Jozef Tiso. Under the Nazis, Tiso had already introduced anti-Semitic legislation to prevent Jews from holding public jobs, attending schools, or owning property. Now he was under pressure to go further. For the Nazis, these maps were blueprints for subsequent policy. They allowed them at a glance to look at the dots and see where the Jewish communities lived in this area. And just a year later, in March 1942,
they started rounding them up from the towns and villages here. The Slovakian Jews were sent to their deaths in the concentration camps. Within 6 months, 58,000 men, women, and children had been taken. This neat statistical map of Slovakia was being used to drive the so-called final solution.
In the hands of the Nazis, maps had become tools for genocide. After the Second World War, revelations about Nazi atrocities and the ideological tensions of the Cold War created a generation suspicious of government. The authority of maps also came under scrutiny. In May 1973, a German historian called Arno Peters confronted the map-making establishment.
He denounced the most famous map of the world and said it was distorted by political and cultural prejudice. This is the map that generations of school kids have grown up with. It's the famous Mercator projection. But Peters shocked the world when he announced that this map was quite simply wrong. He pointed out that Mercator was distorting the size of countries in an attempt to retain their shape. As a result, Europe looks far more prominent, whereas the developing countries are being downplayed. If we look at Africa and Greenland, they look about the same size. But Africa is actually 14 times bigger.
Peters condemned this map as being imperialist and racist. Peters was no cartographer, but he thought he had the solution. Taking account of the relative size of each country, he came up with a new formula for representing the globe on a map. And he called it the Peters projection. Peters claimed his map showed the true size of countries for the first time ever. He dramatically reduced the size of Europe whilst expanding the size of Africa, elongating South America. And it's still something of a shock to look
at this map and see how large these two continents loom on the Peters projection. Peters regarded himself as a champion of what he called the non-white peoples. And he saw this map as part of a wider project to right the wrongs that he saw as being perpetrated against those people living in the developing world. Arno Peters invited nearly 300 members of the international press to the unveiling of his new world map. The media embraced it with enthusiasm, but professional cartographers were furious at what they saw as the cheek of this outsider. They called the map deceptive, absurd, illogical. They were clearly really annoyed at what they saw as an untrained cartographer trying to map the
world. And they accused Peters of making a map that was full of errors. The reaction was very disappointing for Arno Peters. It was in sharp contrast to the great enthusiasm of the international press. The map-making establishment saw it as a fundamental criticism of their profession. But he stayed optimistic and said, "This map will prevail, because it will succeed internationally." And the Peters projection did become an international mapping phenomenon. Anyone who wanted to display their liberal credentials pulled down their Mercators and proudly replaced them with the Peters projection.
It was championed by Oxfam, the United Nations, and the Catholic Church. And it sold more than 80 million copies across the world. But the Peters projection did have distortions of its own. Despite all the success and adulation, the critics did have a point. The Peters projection was flawed, and it wasn't even accurate on its own terms. Peters had made some basic miscalculations, which meant that countries like Chad and Nigeria were twice their actual length. Did Peters ever accept that there were inaccuracies on the map? He was certainly prepared to accept mistakes. But no argument convinced him, because everything had been calculated.
Every point had even been recalculated to a specific formula developed by experts. He kept on checking. And no mistakes were found. Arno Peters was attacking other maps for being biased. Yet he was blind to the fact that the Peters projection was just as distorted by his own political assumptions. But the Peters projection did do something quite extraordinary. It finally exploded the myth that maps can ever be 100% accurate, scientific, objective representations of the world. It showed that maps always have social and political agendas.
Arno Peters not only transformed the way we look at the world, he also changed the way we look at maps. There is no such thing as a neutral map, and you're kidding yourself if you think you are neutral cartographer. Since the 1970s, radical map makers have been building on Arno Peters' legacy, deliberately using maps to promote alternative views of the world. If you think the Peters projection was strange, what about these maps? These images are so distorted that you can hardly tell that they represent the outlines of countries. They look more like peculiar pieces of abstract art, but they represent a very special kind of map, and it's a map with an urgent
and very powerful political agenda. These images are part of the World Mapper project, launched in 2005. They use statistics compiled by the United Nations to redraw the map of the world. These images draw attention to some of the greatest problems facing humanity in developing countries. This map shows HIV infection across the globe. Tragically, Africa dominates the entire map. India and Southeast Asia are also large. Europe reduced, very small up there. This one shows refugee destinations, and the shape changes again. This time, places like Sri Lanka become massively distorted, as does South America, and rather interestingly, so does the Middle East.
Here, teenage pregnancies. India now is the most dominant figure with the highest number of teenage pregnancies, in contrast to Japan, which is only a speck with the lowest rates. And finally, this map, infant mortality rates. Again, India and Southeast Asia loom large, but the map is once again dominated by Africa, with the largest number of babies dying under the age of one in the entire world. What was your aim in making these maps? What were you trying to do? I thought that now we had all this information about almost everybody in the world, it should be made much more widely available. And by available, I mean not just the numbers being
available, but the actual picture of what it was showing being made available, so that people around the world could see what was being counted about them, what was known about their lives, and then you could decide for yourselves what you felt about it, what you wanted to do about it. And that's the power of the map, isn't it? I mean, I'm fascinated by how you see that importance, that the map does something that text can't do. What is it that the map can give us? the map give us? The map taps into a whole part of our brain and our imaginations which text doesn't do. It's like looking at a face, looking at a picture. You first of all see the kind of eye line of the map, and it taps into different emotions. I mean, you
you can't take a ratio of numbers and become that concerned about it, but when you see picture, it appears to be real. It's very different. These maps, with their swollen and shrunken countries, are a dramatic call to action. They take a mountainous statistics, which are usually so easy to ignore, and provide shocking clarity, a profound understanding of the most pressing problems that face our world today. The World Mapper project captures the spirit of the digital age, globally aware, visually sophisticated, and technically innovative. And when it comes to navigating our way around the planet,
today's photoreal online maps from companies like Microsoft and Google can take us anywhere in the world at the click of a mouse. From their corporate playground here in Zurich, Google Earth routinely sends out cars with mounted cameras to map our roads, cameras on tricycles to get into heritage sites, and aerial teams to capture the big picture. These images are combined with satellite photographs, and then wrapped around a 3D model of the Earth to create an instantly accessible virtual world. It's the technology that only a few years ago would have been impossible outside of defense departments or, you know, the CIA. And now you have access to that information, and you can fly around the world with very high rates of
frame update. I mean, it looks very smooth, and there's a massive amount of very clever technology going on behind the scenes. You can explore as if you were flying over the Alps, you know, in a jet fighter from your home, and that's amazing. Google Earth has been downloaded by over half a billion people worldwide, and it's no surprise, because there's something incredibly exhilarating about seeing our planet suspended there in space, hurtling down through the layers, and coming to rest in your own street, which is what most people do when they usually log on to Google Earth.
And this is Oxford. This is where I live. That's my own street, and that's where I get my coffee in the morning. This is a miniature version of the Earth at our fingertips. The world now seems open and accessible to all. Digital maps produced by online companies all over the world are helping to redefine the relationships between global corporations, national governments, and individual citizens. One of the things that surprised us was how quickly Google Earth became a tool for people, individuals, organizations to communicate their idea, whatever they had a concern over. In the Amazon, there was a tribe that we got to know who had for many years
avoided civilization. So, they didn't have a culture of writing reports or creating maps, but nevertheless, they were in an area that was under environmental pressure from logging and so on. But because they could recognize their local area from images, they were able to use Google Earth as a tool to delineate their tribal areas, and then use that information then to fight their case. Maps have also been used to mobilize international public opinion. In places like Darfur, the mapping has taken on even more political resonance, isn't it? Yeah, so a few years ago, when the atrocities were happening in Darfur,
we worked with an organization in the United States to actually show people pictures of villages that had been burned. You can actually see the circles that were the people's huts that had been burned. And that had a huge human impact. For hundreds of years, maps have been used to do so much more than help us navigate around the globe. From the spiritual meditations of the medieval Catholic Church, to Victorian anxieties about civilization, poverty, and disease. Maps have been used to help us carve up, manipulate, and make sense of the world. Digital maps are now being used in the same way.
They feed our hunger for instant information, and define our fears for the future of the world in the 21st century. Human beings have been making maps of one sort or another ever since we first walked the Earth. And what I've always loved about them is the fact that they define our world, rather than simply reflecting it. And they'll continue to shape who we are and what we do as humans, whatever our future.
