In the past few months I’ve agreed to develop a course called “A Critical History of Cartography” for our department’s new Masters and Certificate in Digital Mapping. This initiative, which we call New Maps Plus, will offer interested students the ability to earn a Certificate or a Masters of Science from the University of Kentucky in subjects covering digital mapping, GIS, the geoweb, and programming for online maps.

One of the things I proposed for this course was to develop a Reader in Critical Cartography, which would collect in one place, with short commentary, the people, events, maps and theory that had a profound influence on the way we think about maps, or conversely, the way maps may have made us see the world in new ways. This book would then be the assigned reading for the course but would also I hope be of interest to a wider…