Figuring the Earth: Geodesy in the history of geography

Keywords: History of geography, Cartography, Cosmology
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 18

Abstract

Geodesy is the measurement and modeling of the earth: locating its places, measuring their distances, and visualizing its figure as a whole. Though its history and current practice are closely intertwined with those of geography, physics, metrology, navigation, cartography, and surveying, the subject is largely neglected in the social sciences. The critical attention extended to maps, GIS, and geolocative technologies has not yet extended to their geodetic underpinnings. Modern geodesy emerged in the 18th century in the midst of empire and state expansion as part of a cosmopolitical foment seeking a new alignment between the celestial and earthly orders; it took French scientists bearing English instruments and Spanish permissions from Lapland to the Andes. While this period in the history of cartography will be familiar to most, centering geodesy in it foregrounds different elements—namely, the richness of measurement as a geographic practice, and the degree to which the scientific debates, practical efforts, visual shifts, and political developments usually characterized as rationalist and disenchanting remain tied up with the cosmological problem of imagining the world as a place. Attending to the geodetic nuances of measurement and calculation helps us see that coordinates, GPS, and other systems whose use and standard criticisms we take for granted entail cosmological elements no less metaphysical and fantastical than the cosmographies they came to replace. This cosmopolitical history sheds light on changing imaginaries of the whole earth, shifting ideas about the knowledge of its places and distances, and therefore the uses of mapping.