Digitale Landschaften (review)

This book on digital landscapes addresses an important topic that has not as yet been studied by historians of technology very thoroughly. It aims at localizing the recent automation of geographical data gathering, processing, and representation within the broad context of a history of cartography. In roughly 200 pages, it covers four centuries and analyzes developments in the United States and in Germany.

The history of cartography is a well-established field, but research such as Leo Bagrow’s History of Cartography (1964) has traditionally focused on the early modern period, when cartographer-artists produced beautiful masterpieces that paved the way for the modern appropriation of the world. In contrast, modern surveying practices have only reluctantly been embraced as topics of historical research because these engineering practices seemed so closely connected to contemporary cartographic knowledge production. With the advent of the computer, cartography changed radically—and so has its history. Historians could now open the Pandora’s box of modern surveying and connect these endeavors to more general historical changes in the modern period (as, for example, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography [1987] and Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 [1997]).

Schramm takes one more step by bringing this last (digital) turn into historical perspective. His central question is how a new mode of spatial perception emerged after 1945. It seems reasonable to investigate this computer-driven cartographic revolution and the unprecedented global scale of computerized cartography. His book is highly welcome because it discusses the advent of photogrammetry, satellite imaging, geographical information systems, and electronic data processing. Germany and the United States are well-chosen fields of study as they were the leading centers of cartography in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, respectively. It comes as no surprise that the efficiency craze drove American cartographers to quickly take up new information technologies while their German counterparts defended the artisan tradition of the mapmakers’ trade.

Unfortunately, Schramm only manages to prove the historical relevance of his topic. He does not offer a convincing overall account. He commences with a short essay on the emergence of modern landscape perception in the seventeenth century, but then fails to connect this cultural history to the very technical story he tells about the twentieth century. The subsequent chapter on the professionalization of cartographers and surveyors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries omits all questions concerning social power relations. This is astonishing because maps achieved an unprecedented power function precisely in this epoch.

Chapters 3 and 4 on recent technical changes and on their consequences for the cartographic representation of terrain are better. But even here the brevity of the account limits the analysis. When arguing why photogrammetry was introduced in the United States earlier than in Germany, for example, Schramm constantly refers to accuracy and costs. It was always two separate questions for cartographers: what to measure accurately and how to measure it precisely. The quality of a mapping technique cannot be judged objectively, but follows the assigned function of the product. And the cost of a specific procedure in itself cannot explain why it was adopted or ignored. Furthermore, Schramm does not differentiate between accuracy and precision; he implies that levels of accuracy are inherent in techniques. And he gives no convincing answer as to why specific expert communities could secure funding while others did not. Chapter 5 promises insights into the fragmentation of space in postmodern philosophy and the emergence of transnational concepts of space. The final chapter is on cognitive mapping.

Schramm ignores relevant literature in the field. In view of the fact that he follows a comparative approach to United States and German positions, it is a pity that he took no notice of the scholarship of Stefan Kaufmann (for example Soziologie der Landschaft [2005] and Kaufmann, ed., Vernetzte Steuerung [2007]). This German author would have been relevant because of his comparative work on U.S. and German cartographic traditions since the eighteenth century. Kaufmann also has analyzed the military applications of geographical...