The Socio-technical Development of Digital Maps

By charting a socio-technical history of digital maps, this chapter shows that although they inherit concerns over accuracy, map projections, perspective, ratio, printing house positionality, and indexicality—as technologies they were ‘developed with little input from geographers or cartographers’ (Wilson, Digital Geographies. Sage, 2019, p. 49). Instead, as web native media their development has been inflected with concerns over the cultural politics surrounding the Internet, web, and wider proliferation of digital technologies. This includes debates over ownership, authorship, legitimacy, and the status of digital maps as material artefacts. Also, on the use of algorithms to generate, curate, render, and suggest content (Wilmott, Mobile Mapping: Space, Cartography and the Digital. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020; Fallucchi et al., Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2021). At the same time, digital maps have become increasingly accessible via smart mobile devices, offering new forms of digital citizenship and participation, opening grounds for claims to legitimacy to be made about place (McClean, 2020). Also, for differing and playful relations to be forged with space. In short, digital maps present possibilities for new cultural and social practices to emerge, and for existing ways of knowing and doing space to be reconfigured—but as products of the web, not as a remediation of paper-based maps.