ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the historical transitions and institutional circumstances through which both kinds of mapmaking came to be recognized by geologists, stockholders, land developers and First Nations citizens as legitimate ways to represent knowledge and, like paper maps, how digital maps came to be used as vehicles of authority and expertise, and as proxies for otherwise inaccessible objects. Focusing on the institutional contexts of digital cartography and data assembly in emergent and interrelated controversies over development proposals, environmental conservation and indigenous territorial rights reveals the central importance of standardization and institutional control in the making of maps. Making sense of the professional ethics of digital cartography means attending to the material cultures that dictate the ways new communities of practitioners have learned to collect, classify and display different categories of information. Depending upon the rhetorical context, expressions of traditional ecological knowledge may include references to supernatural agencies or explanations of the links between ecological phenomena, social relationships and human health.
