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Contents

  • Pictures at an exhibition
    • The World in Maps 1400 – 1600
    • Pieter Pourbus, Master of Maps- Excursion of the Brussels Map Circle
      • Lecture by Dr Jan Trachet
      • Visit to the Groeningemuseum
      • Visit to the Gruuthuse museum and City Hall
  • History and Cartography
    • Les atlas de Louis XIV [The Atlases of Louis XIV]
    • Maps of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands
  • The Brussels Map Circle News
    • 9th International Symposium of the International Cartographic Association’s (ICA) Commission on the History of Cartography in Berlin
    • Berlinghieri’s Geography Unveiled

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From the lobby of the Metropole Hotel (Brussels): a relief map of Belgium with cities, roads and waterways lighting up on the map by pushing the button corresponding to the directory. On sale at Drouot on 30 March 2023 at 14.00 h.
Read more.

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e-Perimetron is a pluralist peer reviewed international journal which does not obey any particular ideological, theoretical or methodological approach in dealing with humanistic, artistic, scientific and technological issues related to map history and cartographic heritage. The journal is published quarterly during the year.
Read more.

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The Portolan is the journal of the Washington Map Society; it furthers the purpose of the Society “to support and promote map collecting, cartography and the study of cartographic history.” The Portolan, the largest and most-widely distributed publication of its kind in the Americas, is issued three times per year, in the Spring/Summer, the Fall and Winter.
Read more.

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Contents

  • Picture at an exhibition
    • Bari and its sea from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The cartographic representation and views of the Land of Bari
    • Straightforward. Navigation at sea from 1500 to the 21st century
    • 500th Anniversary of the first circumnavigation of the Globe
  • Looks at Books
    • Maps that made History - 1000 Years of world history in 100 old maps
  • History and cartography
    • French maps of Malta, sixteenth to nineteenth centuries
    • The mapping of the French king's hunting grounds: Berthiers's Carte des chasses du roi
  • How I got into cartography
    • An interview with Kevin Rodríguez Wittman
  • The Brussels Map Circle News
    • A Masterclass in Geopolitics
    • Mapping Ukraine Conference report
    • Obituary - Marcel Van Brussel

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Imago Mundi is a fully-refereed, English-language journal founded in 1935. It is the only international, interdisciplinary and scholarly journal solely devoted to the study of early maps in all their aspects. Full-length articles, with abstracts in English, French, German and Spanish, deal with the history and interpretation of non-current maps and mapmaking in any part of the world. Imago Mundi also publishes shorter articles that communicate significant new findings or new opinions. All articles are fully illustrated.
Read more.

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Matthew Edney has just posted his annual list of books on all aspects of map history published in the last year, as he has noticed them. There are 96 items, 60 from 2022, the remainder being items missed from 2020 and 2021.
Link to the list.
Matthew Edney is Osher Professor in the History of Cartography, University of Southern Maine, and Director, History of Cartography Project, University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is also the author of numerous books and articles on the history of cartography.

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DigHimapper - Crowdsourcing the Arenberg map collection.
For a long time historical maps have been cherished as objects of great value and beauty, illustrating the evolving representation of the world, cities and (rural) landscapes. Recently, they tend to be seen as more than mere illustrations. Up until now, however, preparing historical maps and building spatial databases of directly deductible information to allow the use of these maps as primary sources for fundamental research, was a very labor-intensive process. This is caused mainly by the necessity of two time-consuming preparatory steps that have to be undertaken to (pre-)process historical maps: 1) the georectification (overlay of historical maps with present-day situation) and 2) the spatial annotation of toponyms (transcription and localisation of place names). Grasping the full opportunities of the recently started close FED-tWIN-co-operation between the History Department of the University of Antwerp and the Belgian State Archives, this project aims to offer an alternative to solve the bottle-neck in the processing and use of digital historical maps: the development of a web-application for crowdsourcing both the georectification and spatial annotation of historical maps. Teaming up with ICT-partner Webmapper, ca. 3 000 high-resolution scanned historical maps from the Arenberg collection, digitized by and held at the Belgian State Archives, will be opened to the 'crowd' in order to establish a spatial database of up to (or over) 100 000 toponyms. Once completed, this database serves a threefold research objective: 1) fundamental research on landscape history based on 'big data of the past', in this case large datasets of toponyms; 2) using local toponyms as a way to include other sources for spatial research and 3) an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of crowdsourcing when scaling-up the research in the coming years. Read more.

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