Hi All-
I’m the Review Editor for the “Atlas and Book Review” section of the WAML Information Bulletin. I’m seeking reviewers for the following three books (descriptions for these books are taken from Amazon):
Basic GIS Coordinates, 3rd Edition, by Jan Van Sickle, CRC Press, August 2017, ISBN: 978-1498774628
This book grants readers with a solid understanding of coordinates and coordinate systems and how they operate as well as valuable insight into what causes them to malfunction. This practical and comprehensive guide lays
out the foundation of a coordinate system and the implications behind building it as it elaborates on heights, two coordinate systems, and the rectangular system. The previous editions described horizontal and vertical datums such as the North American Datum
1983 (NAD 83) and the North American Vertical Datum 1988 (NAVD 88). Both will be replaced in 2022 or thereabouts. The National Geodetic Survey (NGS) plans to replace NAD83 with a new semi-dynamic terrestrial reference frame for North America and a new vertical
datum will replace NAVD88. The foundation of the new vertical datum will be a temporally tracked gravimetric geoid. The interim period is intended to smooth the transition to the new paradigm and this new edition explores the changes and provides assistance
in understanding them.
The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence, by S. Max Edelson, Harvard University Press, April 2017, ISBN: 978-0674972117
After the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, and across new islands in the West Indies. To better rule
these vast dominions, Britain set out to map its new territories with unprecedented rigor and precision. Max Edelson’s
The New Map of Empire pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the generation before the American Revolution.
The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860, by Martin Brückner, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina
Press, November 2017, ISBN: 978-1469632605
In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure
and instruction. A "carto-coded" America--a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful--had to be created. The Social Life of Maps tracks American cartography's spectacular rise to its unprecedented cultural influence.
Between 1750 and 1860, maps did more than communicate geographic information and political pretensions. They became affordable and intelligible to ordinary American
men and women looking for their place in the world. School maps quickly entered classrooms, where they shaped reading and other cognitive exercises; giant maps drew attention in public spaces; miniature maps helped Americans chart personal experiences. In
short, maps were uniquely social objects whose visual and material expressions affected commercial practices and graphic arts, theatrical performances and the communication of emotions.
This lavishly illustrated study follows popular maps from their points of creation to shops and galleries, schoolrooms and coat pockets, parlors and bookbindings.
Between the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, early Americans bonded with maps; Martin Bruckner's comprehensive history of quotidian cartographic encounters is the first to show us how.
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Deadline will be the mid-February for these reviews. (I will send you more specifics if wind up reviewing one of these books). Please contact me off-list if you’re
interested and I’ll send you the book, the reviewer guidelines, and a due date.
Thanks-
Ilene
Ilene Raynes
Map Library Program Manager
Jerry Crail Johnson Earth Sciences & Map Library
Sciences Department, University Libraries
University of Colorado Boulder
184 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309
303-492-4487