No Dig, No Fly, No Go

Resumen del libro

Some maps help us find our way; others restrict where we go and what we do. These maps control behavior, regulating activities from flying to fishing, prohibiting students from one part of town from being schooled on the other, and banishing certain individuals and industries to the periphery. This restrictive cartography has boomed in recent decades as governments seek regulate activities as diverse as hiking, building a residence, opening a store, locating a chemical plant, or painting your house anything but regulation colors. It is this aspect of mapping its power to prohibit that celebrated geographer Mark Monmonier tackles in No Dig, No Fly, No Go.



Rooted in ancient Egypt's need to reestablish property boundaries following the annual retreat of the Nile's floodwaters, restrictive mapping has been indispensable in settling the American West, claiming slices of Antarctica, protecting fragile ocean fisheries, and keeping sex offenders away from playgrounds. But it has also been used for opprobrium: during one of the darkest moments in American history, cartographic exclusion orders helped send thousands of Japanese Americans to remote detention camps. Tracing the power of prohibitive mapping at multiple levels from regional to international and multiple dimensions from property to cyberspace Monmonier demonstrates how much boundaries influence our experience from homeownership and voting to taxation and airline travel. A worthy successor to his critically acclaimed How to Lie with Maps, the book is replete with all of the hallmarks of a Monmonier classic, including the wry observations and witty humor.

Biografía del autor

Mark Monmonier (Baltimore, EE.UU., 1943) es un prolífico escritor, cartógrafo, especialista informático, así como un erudito profesor universitario cuya amplia carrera académica ha discurrido en las universidades de Rhode Island, en la State University of New York at Albany y en la Syracuse University, en donde es Distinguished Professor de Geografía desde 1998. De su fecunda vida profesional, destaca el haber publicado el primer libro de texto sobre cartografía digital, Computer-Assisted Cartography: Principles and Prospects (Prentice-Hall, 1982), contribuyendo de forma innovadora a la gráfica estadística interactiva y a la visualización de datos. De forma inesperada, un artículo científico de su juventud, Maximum-difference barriers (1973), se convirtió recientemente en una herramienta imprescindible para la investigación en ingeniería genética y en lingüística. Tanto es así, que dicho algoritmo lleva su nombre: Algoritmo de Monmonier. Entre sus obras más destacadas se encuentran Technological Transition in Cartography (1985), Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather (1999), Spying with Maps (2002), Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection (2004), From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame (2008), Maps with the News: The Development of American Journalistic Cartography (2019) y Clock and Compass: How John Byron Plato Gave Farmers a Real Address (2022). Igualmente, Monmonier es editor de uno de los volúmenes del monumental The History of Cartography, Volume 6: Cartography in the Twentieth Century (2015). Monmonier ha sido galardonado con la medalla O.M. Miller de la American Geographical Society (2001), con la medalla Charles L. Hosler de la Pennsylvania State University (2007) y con el Premio Mercator de la German Cartographic Society e.V. (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kartographie e.V.) en 2009.