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A Mirror of Our World: Google Earth and the History of Cartography

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A Mirror of Our World: Google Earth and the History of Cartography Page 1 Coordinates Series B, No. 12 A Mirror of Our World: Google Earth and the History of Cartography Persistent URL for citation: http://purl.oclc.org/ coordinates/b12.pdf David Y. Allen Date of Publication: 08/20/09 David Y. Allen (e-mail: [email protected]) is retired map librarian at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York. Abstract: Google Earth is widely admired as one of the most advanced and powerful products of modern computerized cartography. It has been praised as a revolutionary new way of viewing the earth, as the first convincing attempt at a mirror-world or a simulacrum of the earth. Nonetheless, Google Earth is deeply rooted in the practices and conventions of Western cartography. This article examines what is new and what is old in Google Earth. It especially focuses on the extent to which Google Earth constitutes a mirror world, and on the philosophical meaning and validity of such concepts as cartographic mirroring and representation. It also speculates about the possible future development of Google Earth and similar efforts to mirror the world in digital form. Keywords: Google Earth; history of cartography; maps; atlases; virtual reality; mimesis; representation; mirror worlds; simulacra The Wonder of Google Earth Google Earth is arguably the most impressive cartographic achievement of the twenty-first century (at least so far). It is remarkable for its relatively detailed and comprehensive coverage of the earth’s surface, for its speed and flexibility, for its relative ease of use, and for its ability to incorporate new information from users. Page 2 Although there are several similar programs (most notably Microsoft’s Bing Maps, formerly called Virtual Earth), none have so far been able to match Google Earth in popularity. According to one source, as of February 11, 2008, Google Earth had been installed on at least 350 million computers.[NOTE 1] Since then, a version has become available for Apple’s iphone, which has doubtless helped increase the number of installations. It is also much discussed in blogs, the popular press, and scholarly publications.[NOTE 2] It is not hard to understand why this program has become so popular. It is a remarkable experience to open Google Earth and see our planet suspended in virtual space on a computer screen, and then to dive through increasing levels of detail to the point where one’s own house becomes visible. It is wonderful to view detailed, three-dimensional images of most of the earth’s surface—to rotate and tilt them, to examine them at various angles, and to see them illuminated in different ways by the sun. As if this is not enough, Google provides a rich display of supplementary information about many places: historical maps, hiking trails, photographs, three-dimensional views of buildings, traffic information, along with the locations of banks, restaurants, bars, filling stations, and much more. For those not satisfied with learning about the surface of our planet, it also includes the oceans, Mars, the moon, and a telescopic view of outer space. In my opinion, Google Earth’s popularity is justified. One can get a better sense from Google Earth than from any other single source of what a particular place is like, such as an obscure island off the coast of Canada. It accomplishes this by enabling us to view three-dimensional images, supplemented by multiple layers of information (such as roads and landmarks), along with photographs, and often hyperlinked articles and even videos. Google Earth is also impressive just in terms of its size and its cost. Statistics about Google Earth are hard to come by, but it incorporates many terabytes of data, which are divided into more than 100,000 tiles. It must have taken countless hours and enormous amounts of money to create. If nothing else, it is an impressive display of the powers of modern technology and capitalism to mobilize resources.[NOTE 3] It is not often in the modern world that the sense of wonder is evoked, but Google Earth has done just that. It is not only powerful and useful, but it creates a strong sense of virtual reality, and has been widely described as a mirror world, a second world, a virtual earth, or a simulacrum. One blogger has commented: As a simulacrum of the Earth, Google Earth provides a safe space for unlimited voyeurism. You have instant access to forbidden or dangerous places—North Korea, Mecca, the Kremlin, the favellas of Rio, the top of Everest. But mostly it's fun to hop around. Freed from physical constraints, the Google Earther perceives the planet as small, manageable, knowable, and interconnected. This bonhomie can be exhilarating.[NOTE 4] Another blog, Ogleearth, which is dedicated to exploring Google Earth, sometimes contains discussions of Google Earth as a mirror or simulacrum. One Ogleearth blogger makes an interesting (although highly debatable) comparison between Google Earth and traditional atlases: Brainy improvements improve the quality of the information that Google Earth delivers, or improve the efficiency of access to existing information—they improve the function of Google Earth as an atlas. Beauty improvements, on the other hand, improve the function of Google Page 3 Earth as a plausible mirror world, an ever-more accurate simulacrum of Earth. Atlas or mirror world, what’s the difference? Their functions are in fact poles apart. Atlases filter out as much as possible that which is not information or which obscures information. Mirror worlds, on the other hand, aim for the accents and details that provide a sheen of reality —precisely that which atlases strip off in the pursuit of clarity. Atlases try to augment reality by pushing high-information content to the fore. Mirror worlds do not.” [NOTE 5] This provocative quotation raises further questions: What, exactly, is the relationship between Google Earth and older forms of cartography? To what extent is it valid to describe Google Earth as a simulacrum, a mirror-world, or as a form of virtual reality? What is Old in Google Earth To a person knowledgeable about the history of cartography, there is something familiar about this enthusiasm for Google Earth, and about the description of it as a simulacrum or mirror world. This reaction is not unlike the wave of enthusiasm that greeted the initial appearance of atlases in the sixteenth century. The very names of some of these early atlases imply that their creators saw them as somehow mirroring the world: Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the Earthly Orb), and De Jode’s Speculum Orbis Terrarum (Mirror of the Earthly Orb), and Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer’s Spiegel der Seefahrt (published in English as The Mariner's Mirror).[NOTE 6] The idea that atlases can mirror the world was also expressed in contemporary commentaries. Thus, the 1598 French language abridgment of the Theatrum contains a prefatory ode that concludes: “This book by itself is the entire world; the entire world is but this book.”[NOTE 7] The idea that the world can be mirrored through symbolic representation was not confined to the sixteenth century, or even to maps. Here is a description of the pleasures of armchair travel (sometimes attributed to John Locke) from the preface to Awnshawm and John Churchill’s A Collection of Voyages and Travels (1704): To conclude, the empire of Europe is now extended to the utmost bounds of the earth where several of its nations have conquests and colonies. These and many more are the advantages drawn from the labours of those who expose themselves to the dangers of the vast ocean, and of unknown nations; which those who sit still at home abundantly reap in every kind: and the relation of one traveller is an incentive to stir up another to imitate him; whilst the rest of mankind, in their accounts without stirring a foot, compass the earth and seas, visit all countries, and converse with all nations. [NOTE 8] The conception of cartographic mirroring is not limited to Western culture. In eighteenth-century Korea, Page 4 the author of an atlas of China remarked: A scholar who never travels but stays at home is not worthy to be accounted a scholar. From my youth on I had the ambition to travel, but could not afford to wander over the three hundred counties of Korea, much less the whole world. So, carrying out an ancient practice, I drew a geographical atlas. And while gazing at it for long stretches at a time I feel as though I was carrying out my ambition . Morning and evening while bending over my small study table, I meditate on it and play with it and there in one vast panorama are the districts, the prefectures and the four seas, and endless stretches of thousands of miles. [NOTE 9] The notion that a map can somehow mirror the world remained a common trope in western cartography until well into the nineteenth century, and it lingered in some scholarly places into the twentieth. Only gradually did academics and map makers start to think about the intellectual problems raised by regarding a map as a literal representation of the world. The mirror-world concept started to be questioned around the time that Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodson) wrote his gentle satire about cartographers in a fictional country who drew a map at a scale of a mile to a mile, which was never used because farmers complained that it would block the sunlight if it was spread out over the earth— forcing the map makers “to use the country itself as its own map,” which served “nearly as well.” [NOTE 10] The idea that a good map somehow mirrors the surface of the world was not completely abandoned in academic circles until recently.
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