Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography

Appendices

285 APPENDIX A Methodology Given the large scope of this work, it stands to reason that I used a variety of research methods. The principal ones involved analyzing unpublished and published documents, correspondence, and interviews, and using participant observation. For clarity, I present these methods in the same order and relevance as the successive sections of Map Worlds. The reality of doing research involved my constant migration among the methods. Participant observation might lead to interviews which then might lead to the study of documents, and so on. DOCUMENTS Documents in cartography were extensive. They involved a variety of languages , including English, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Icelandic, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. My acquaintance with the latter two were more rudimentary than I had hoped. PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS The standard works in cartography are de rigueur in this line of work, and all of the published sources I consulted can be found in the References section of this book. The reader will also note references to some of cartography ’s key journals, including Imago Mundi, Cartographica, and Progress and APPENDIX A 286 Perspectives; national newsletters; and particular reference works, with special reference to the multi-volume encyclopedic The History of Cartography. Trade journals in surveying, geodesy, and the like were also useful. To create the vignettes, I relied extensively on personal contact and on the friends and colleagues of those women cartographers who had already died. UNPUBLISHED DOCUMENTS I have made extensive use of listservs of a number of national cartographic societies, which allowed me to correspond with specialists in historical cartography and cartography, map librarians, map dealers, and map archivists , as well as with members of national and international societies, conference organizers, and volunteers. Usually, such correspondence took the shape of emails, but also of regular mail. I corresponded with at least fifty people, although the precise number is unknown. These contacts provided in-depth information to my queries about cartography in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. There are a large number of websites devoted to recording the contributions and families of cartographers in the golden age of cartography. VIGNETTES OF WOMEN PIONEERS The process of sifting through the names of many women cartographers could not have taken place without the indispensable help of Dr. Fraser Taylor of Carleton University; Ms. Alberta Auringer Wood, formerly of Memorial University of Newfoundland; Ms. Wendy Straight of Progress and Perspectives; Dr. Henry Steward of Clark University; Dr. Julia Siemer of the University of Regina; Ms. Mary Ritzlin of Evanston, Illinois; Dr. Mark Monmonier ; Dr. Ewen A. Whitaker, formerly of the University of Arizona; and Dr. David Coleman of the University of New Brunswick. Judith Tyner was also helpful in identifying pioneers. Collectively, these pioneers embraced cartography, cyber-cartography, surveying (now called geodesy), map librarianship , historical cartography, antique map dealership, historical cartography , and seneology. I kept a running list of potential women pioneers in contemporary cartography as I proceeded through my research. In the end, my list grew from twelve names to twenty-three. I promised that I would not only send the still-living pioneers what I have written about them, but that I would try to secure their approval for the vignette before publication in the book. In the case of one, I had to rely on publicly available documents, because I could not reach the person directly and secure more information that might be of interest to the reader. METHODOLOGY 287 I aimed at creating a list that was not Anglo-Saxon in orientation, but rather encompasses women pioneers in North America, Europe, Central and South America, and Asia. No doubt the perceptive reader will spot particular gaps. In creating the vignettes, I took advantage of what the Internet could offer. I amplified my research by sorting through the publications and works of the women featured and seized the opportunity to correspond with all pioneers. If the pioneer was deceased, I contacted the person who would most likely have known about her. The final vignette was thus a collaborative effort between the living subject (or an acquaintance) and me, and an attempt to correlate the many documents available to me. PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION Participant observation involves the intensive study of a particular culture . Normally, the social anthropologist (or sociologist) immerses her- or himself in the ways of doing and thinking of that culture, often for an extended period of time. Such an engagement could last anywhere from several months to several years...