PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
November 2020
659
BOOK
REVIEW
Connections and Content: Reflections on
Networks and the History of Cartography
Mark Monmonier
Esri Press, Redlands, California. 2019. xiv and 275 pp, 90 black
and white illustrations, index. Softcover. ISBN 978-1-58948-
559-4. $39.99. eBook also available.
Reviewed by
Stewart Walker, sole proprietor,
photogrammetry4u llc, San Diego, California.
Mark Monmonier, distinguished professor of geography at
Syracuse University and prolific book writer, is perhaps the
world’s best-known living cartographer. Readers have been
entertained and educated by his
How to Lie with Maps
,
though professional cartographers perhaps know him better
for his editorship of the massive, encyclopedic
Cartography in
the Twentieth Century
. Here he has written another intrigu-
ing volume, not a textbook, rather a “personal reflection on
networks historically important in the development of cartog-
raphy” (p xii), brimming with ideas for students and prac-
titioners alike. Motivated by his fascination with networks,
or interconnected systems, he picked topics that interested
him, for example, the histories of surveying and mapping,
and of the northeastern United States, and molded them into
something gripping.
The structure of the book began thirty years ago, but it was
not written until recently. Monmonier’s family had no car:
public transportation was a part of daily life, memories that
nurture some portions of the book. There are seven chap-
ters. Chapter 1, “Baselines,” examines how the scale of maps
depends on triangulation from measured baselines, while
chapter 2, “Geometry,” samples geodetic concepts - its focus
on latitude and longitude dwells on the use of telegraphic
networks to measure the latter. Though those grounded in
land surveying would doubtless wish for more, it is amazing
how much detail and instruction the author has packed into a
few pages. Chapter 3, “Symbols,” is more directly cartograph-
ic, quite fresh for those of us who left cartography for other
geospatial pastures. Monmonier’s examples from the upper
New York region that he knows are successful. Chapter
4, “Infrastructure,” is equally captivating, transiting from
extensive material on canals to consideration of railroad and
power networks. Chapter 5, “Telecommunications,” is also
eclectic and the better for it, charming the reader with the
practicalities of collecting weather data across the US from
the nineteenth century to the present day. Chapter 6, “To-
pology,” introduces concepts from digital cartography, simply
and persuasively, all the way to Google Maps, Waze, crowd-
sourcing, and positive train control. Chapter 7, “Control,” is
a
potpourri
, from the navigation of vehicles with and with-
out human drivers (cars, trains, drones), to ARPANET, the
internet and psephological musings on the electoral college
and the definition of congressional districts. Maps, therefore,
“… depend on networks of measurements, observations and
other data to provide the content portrayed by cartographic
symbols” and the reverse reliance is true too, since, “many
networks … depend on maps for their design, planning, con-
struction, maintenance and continued operation” (p 206).
There are two pages of acronyms and forty-one of notes,
including not just references but useful, insightful comments.
Readers can find, for example, information on the author’s
political convictions, interesting given his less than fulsome
assessment of gerrymandering earlier in the book! Your
reviewer’s progress through the book was spurred, serendip-
itously, by a reference in the popular press
1
to Carl Abbott’s
Imagined Frontiers: Contemporary America and Beyond
,
where the role of boundary lines on maps is also pondered.
Your reviewer noticed but two typos in an attractive, copi-
ously illustrated, well-produced book. In a discussion of scale
errors (p 9), where readers are struggling to visualize the
effect of incorrect measurement of the angles of an isosceles
triangle (in the absence of the formula for the propagation of
errors), 499.9 is printed as “4,999”. A complaint on the incor-
rect placement of names on an 1850s government basemap (p
133) seems to confuse Oswego, NY with Owego, NY! Intrigu-
ingly, Esri Press deocates the outer margin of every page
with a colored map excerpt that fades into the text, but the
author’s maps are monochrome because the book was origi-
nally planned to be printed in black and white. Monmonier
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing
Vol. 86, No. 11, November 2020, pp. 659–660.
0099-1112/20/659–660
© 2020 American Society for Photogrammetry
and Remote Sensing
doi: 10.14358/PERS.86.11.659
1
Anon, 2020. Lexington: trouble in Trumplandia,
The Econo-
mist
, 436(9204): 21, 25 July.
