ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the way maps organize and communicate ideologies through semantic practices linked to the social and political context and the cognitive apparatus of the cartographer. Maps are socially constructed artifacts that frame and reconceptualize what a cartographer holds apart from the world. The mapmaker's agency is in determining content and context represented in the map. Maps work in the same way Robin Evans suggests architectural representations work, where geometry, far from being a stolid and dormant partner in architecture is an active agent in the links between thinking and imagination, imagination and representation, and representation and building. The world map by cartographer Gerhard Mercator privileges ocean area. The Mercator map made it possible for a ship's navigator to use rhumb lines, the constant sailing courses crossing all meridians of longitude at the same angle, to navigate the world's oceans and seas. Continents in the Gall–Peters projection are shown closer to their actual land area than the Mercator map.
