All Mapped Out

Cultural geographer Duggan works in partnership with the UK national mapping agency, OrdnanceSurvey, to study everyday digital-mapping practices. Important as it is, digital mapping is not supersedinganalogue maps, he observes in his global history of cartography, which begins with Palaeolithic carvings.Sales of Ordnance Survey paper maps are rising, perhaps because of their convenience. “Although digitalmaps are improving constantly in accuracy and design, they do not always live up to those promises.”

* Nature Magazine *

Anyone reading Mike Duggan’s exhaustive deconstruction of the concept of mapping will never lookat a map in the same way again … By examining the complex ways in which maps shape our lives, fromthe politics they create to the emotional responses they evoke, Duggan’s book proceeds to demonstratethat maps deal not only with the cartographic features of our world but “play an important rolein who we are, where we’ve come from and where we’re going.”

* Morning Star *Broad in compass and ambitious in scope, this new look at the map in the digital age is fascinating. Mike Duggan’s journey through maps takes us to places, landscapes and times past, present and future, traversing a busy and sometimes complicated picture and engaging with theoretical views on cartography as well as the pragmatics of how maps shape our lives. All Mapped Out helps us to see maps differently, as well as understand how maps continue to influence us. Compelling and engaging, this book will appeal to cartophiles everywhere. * Keith D. Lilley, Professor of Historical Geography, Queen’s University Belfast *All Mapped Out is an entertaining adventure for everyone who loves maps, both real and imaginary, analogue and digital. Mike Duggan – in this reliable guide to an unreliable technology – invites us to re-examine our assumptions about the spatial representations of not only unfamiliar places, but the sites we inhabit with meaning and call home. * Phil Cohen, Livingmaps Network *From travelling London in the backseat of a black taxi to following grizzly bears and migrants, rally drivers and Tube riders, geocachers and map collectors, All Mapped Out offers a provocative and surprising study of maps and mapping. In this journey, we encounter maps scratched onto rocks and materializing on plasma screens, maps made of words and sounds, and even maps meant to be seen by the eyes of self-driving cars rather than of humans. Mike Duggan asks questions of our present reliance on digital mapping: how the technologies subtly pervade our lives, condition our consumption habits and even shape our experience of the world. * Veronica della Dora, Professor of Human Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London *All Mapped Out is a freewheeling journey through a conceptual terrain with few distinct borders. While treading deep into critical questions about the power and practices of contemporary maps, Duggan also includes plenty of compelling excursions through cartographic history. * Garrett Dash Nelson, President and Head Curator, Leventhal Map and Education Center, Boston Public Library *