Cartographic ideals and geopolitical realities: international maps of the world from the 1890s to the present
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper charts the attempts to construct an international map of the world using a standard projection and common conventions and symbols. The first part of the paper discusses the original incarnation of this idea, the International (1:1 Million) Map of the World (IMW), initially proposed by the German geographer Albrecht Penck in the early 1890s. The IMW was designed to challenge the idea that cartography was an inherently national science undertaken by, and for, specific nation states. Despite endless negotiations, delays and compromises, two world wars and the withdrawal of American support, the IMW project continued through the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, initially at the British Ordnance Survey and subsequently at the United Nations, only to fizzle out in the 1970s. The second part of the paper examines the Global Mapping Project (GMP), the latest manifestation of the same idea. Global Map, the first version of which was released in 2000, is an attempt to construct a single world map for the digital age. Like the IMW before it, Global Map is designed to facilitate a common, trans‐national understanding of global problems. However, the technical, institutional and application challenges facing the GMP are different from those that confronted the IMW. Whereas the primary purpose of the IMW was never consistently defined, Global Map has a clearer environmental and educational objective. But if Global Map is to become an effective tool for sustainable environmental management and development, its advocates will need to learn the lessons of the IMW's failure and secure renewed international commitment to the value of international mapping.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".