It was a great pleasure to spend half a hour talking with my friend Jerry Brotton on his excellent History of Maps podcast, “What’s Your Map“. This excellent podcast series cover the history of cartography by getting people to select a single map to place it’s significance in the development of mapping.
The podcast is supported by the wonderful Oculi Mundi a digital heritage website which is the home of The Sunderland Collection of world maps, celestial maps, atlases, globes and books of knowledge.
My map is he ‘Christian Knight Map’, produced by Jodocus Hondius in 1597, and the first map to use Mercator’s Projection after the death of its inventor, Gerard Mercator.
Now today the Mercator projection is the subject of much criticism, mostly as a result of it’s misuse and no doubt the impact of a episode of the much loved “West Wing” TV show which featured a group of cartographers lobbying the President to ban it’s use !
I make the point in the podcast that beyond any issues of “Social Equality” the projection certainly had many advantages in the early days of web mapping when the size of Greenland did not seem to matter…
Well…