ML139310
People
Contributor
Date
Location
- Age
- Not specified
- Sex
- Not specified
- Playback
- Not specified
Media notes
Subject: (Interview). Subtitle: Norman Thrower. Timecode In: 00:00:04. Timecode out: 00:26:09. Notes: Maps; Mapping. Equipment Notes: Stereo=1; Dual-Channel Mono. NPR/NGS Geographic Century Norman Thrower & Don Smith 12/8/98 DS Dr. Thrower, this will be a fairly brief interview...what we¿re looking for is really your perspective on maps...maybe we could start of by saying who you are and what your connection is with maps. Norman Thrower [NT] :28 I¿m a professor at UCLA. I teach cartography, remote sensing of the environment and geographical discoveries...Norman Thrower. DS :44 In your book...you quote Edmund Halley as having said something about maps, how useful they are for understanding certain phenomenon. Could you just....so as to Edmund Halley, what was he talking about, what did he say? NT 1:21 He was saying that the map provides a basis for understanding that words cannot always perform. In fact that is underlined by the fact that pre-literate people...make and use maps. So it¿s a universal language. DS 1:44 why do we make maps? NT 1:46 Because we¿re interested in spatial things, how things are arranged on the earth. It¿s one thing to look at things chronologically, but another to think of them spatially, how their arranged in relation to one another, and that¿s what the map tells us. DS 2:03 Do you have any idea why people first made maps?... NT 2:20 A part of it was way-finding, how to get from here to there and that was fascilitated by the map. Once a person had been over the hill and he had mapped it, his record of that would help other people to perform the same simple function. DS 2:42 And people were making maps before they were even writing weren¿t they? NT 2:46 That¿s correct. So called pre-literate people, we used to call them primitive maps but we don¿t call them that anymore. We call them the maps of pre-literate people. DS 2:56 And maps and human history are intertwined aren¿t they? You said at one point that maps have influenced history and vice versa, what did you mean by that? NT 3:08 Well I meant that the map is sensitive to changing technologies as man becomes more and more complex in his technology. So mapping reflects that. A good example of this is printing. When printing came about it revolutionized cartography. Actually printing of maps began in China 300 years before it happened in the west. But nevertheless, wherever it happened it had a great influence on mapping because of the exactly repeatable graphic statement. You didn¿t have to copy by hand and perhaps perpetuate and even increase errors, but you could make maps eessentially all the same. DS 3:59 Pre-printing press maps, many of them are beautiful...why do you think that people put such an effort in those days to making maps so beautiful? NT 4:14 It was sales promotion. A great collecting area for maps is the European renaissance. Maps from that period are particulary admired because they were used in libraries, usually by wealthy people. In fact, cartography has been called the science of princes. And it¿s a science of princes because next to their families and even sometimes ahead of their families they were interested in their realms. They couldn¿t visit all parts of their territories but they could see them on maps. DS 4:53 And the King of France, when his country was accurately measured, he decided it was too small. NT 5:00 Right, he had lost territory on his Atlantic and Mediterranean borders... DS 5:13 Let¿s talk about some of the major landmarks in the history of maps. Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the earth. Tell me what he did. NT 5:30 He noticed that when he went to Cyrene...in Egypt, that in the summer solstice the sun was shining directly down a well. But at the same time in Alexandria, where he was heading to the library, ... (Notes truncated)
Technical information
- Recorder
- Microphone
- Accessories
Archival information
- Cataloged
- 4 May 2005 - Ben Brotman
- Digitized
- 4 May 2005 - Ben Brotman
- Edited
- 4 May 2005 - Ben Brotman