How Has The World Map Changed Over Time
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How Maps Change Things
Author: Ward L. Kaiser
language: en
Publisher: New Internationalist Public
Release Date: 2012-02-29
March 5th 2012 marks the 500th birthday of map-maker Gerhard Kremer, aka Mercator. There are many wishing the Flemish map maker well! From blogs to books the man who has shaped for many our world view is celebrated as often as vilified. Four centuries later, Arno Peters created what many see as a fair view of our world, but others see as a distorted or misleading map! Across the centuries it is maps that link these men and their impact on current human activity. This landmark book - How Maps Change Things: A Conversation About the Maps We Choose and the World We Want - looks at maps by these two men and others. This examination goes beyond maps as nouns, as tactile objects that show locations and distances. "Maps are verbs ... don't be fooled" we are told at the outset of How Maps Change Things. The book examines maps as change agents, reflecting intentions and setting agendas, stating who has what, and who has not. What are the messages sent by maps? What were Mercator, Peters and other map makers setting out to do with each of their creations? Ward Kaiser, author, publisher, pastor, and historian was instrumental in bringing the Peters Equal Area Map to North America. He has been leading the discussion of what maps mean and the power of maps in framing human activities. In How Maps Change Things Kaiser takes a passionate view of how maps illustrate and influence the significant paths humans pursue. Rather than looking for definitive answers, Kaiser focuses on asking thought-provoking questions. "What does our world, through the view of maps, really look like and what does the perspective (or frame of reference or bias) of the viewer mean to the map and its view? Are all maps simply propaganda for the hidden agenda of the map-maker? What is the world we get and what is the world we want ... and who cares and why?" Kaiser has stimulated an impressive and important conversation.
Boundaries of a Complex World
The 2nd edition of this book provides novel topics and studyies in boundaries of networks and Big Data Systems.The central theme of this book is the extent to which the structure of the free dynamical boundaries of a system controls the evolution of the system as a whole. Applying three orthogonal types of thinking - mathematical, constructivist and morphological, it illustrates these concepts using applications to selected problems from the social and life sciences, as well as economics. In a broader context, it introduces and reviews some modern mathematical approaches to the science of complex systems. Standard modeling approaches (based on non-linear differential equations, dynamic systems, graph theory, cellular automata, stochastic processes, or information theory) are suitable for studying local problems. However they cannot simultaneously take into account all the different facets and phenomena of a complex system, and new approaches are required to solve the challenging problem of correlations between phenomena at different levels and hierarchies, their self-organization and memory-evolutive aspects, the growth of additional structures and are ultimately required to explain why and how such complex systems can display both robustness and flexibility. This graduate-level text addresses a broader interdisciplinary audience, keeping the mathematical level essentially uniform throughout the book, and involving only basic elements from calculus, algebra, geometry and systems theory.
The Japanese Buddhist World Map
Author: D. Max Moerman
language: en
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Release Date: 2021-12-31
From the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries Japanese monks created hundreds of maps to construct and locate their place in a Buddhist world. This expansively illustrated volume is the first to explore the largely unknown archive of Japanese Buddhist world maps and analyze their production, reproduction, and reception. In examining these fascinating sources of visual and material culture, author D. Max Moerman argues for an alternative history of Japanese Buddhism—one that compels us to recognize the role of the Buddhist geographic imaginary in a culture that encompassed multiple cartographic and cosmological world views. The contents and contexts of Japanese Buddhist world maps reveal the ambivalent and shifting position of Japan in the Buddhist world, its encounter and negotiation with foreign ideas and technologies, and the possibilities for a global history of Buddhism and science. Moerman’s visual and intellectual history traces the multiple trajectories of Japanese Buddhist world maps, beginning with the earliest extant Japanese map of the world: a painting by a fourteenth-century Japanese monk charting the cosmology and geography of India and Central Asia based on an account written by a seventh-century Chinese pilgrim-monk. He goes on to discuss the cartographic inclusion and marginal position of Japan, the culture of the copy and the power of replication in Japanese Buddhism, and the transcultural processes of engagement and response to new visions of the world produced by Iberian Christians, Chinese Buddhists, and the Japanese maritime trade. Later chapters explore the transformations in the media and messages of Buddhist cartography in the age of print culture and in intellectual debates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries over cosmology and epistemology and the polemics of Buddhist science. The Japanese Buddhist World Map offers a wholly innovative picture of Japanese Buddhism that acknowledges the possibility of multiple and heterogeneous modernities and alternative visions of Japan and the world.