ABSTRACT
Maps are broad cultural texts that exist in various political, cultural, and social dimensions and promote a graphic visualization of our relationship with the environment. The history of maps has been traced in parallel with two larger modern processes: industrial developments and the birth of the nation-state (Wood 2010). Before the development of the contemporary technogeographical tools that have changed contemporary cartography, the industrial progress made in printmaking, engraving techniques, photographic reproduction, and the papermaking industries contributed to the cartographic transition from unique hand-made elements to mass popular cultural objects. This proves the map to be a peculiar thing: a “synthesis of signs and a sign itself” (Wood and Fels 1986, 54); the map conceals its makers’ agenda under the mask of factuality and objectivity but at the same time asserts and conveys its ideological validity.
