Edney's huge annotated bibliography of the history of cartography

I'm finding this a little late, but it's well worth a notice. Matthew Edney (Director of the History of Cartography project) has published a massive annotated bibliography of the history of cartography (also available as a pdf).

The fun part of this is Edney's acerbic comments and opinions. For example:

With the failure of the models of cartographic communication, of the parallel to spoken language, and of the psychophysical approach to map design (effectively moribund by 1983), academic cartographers who were not hypnotized by digital technologies increasingly turned to semiology/semiotics (the study of sign systems) as a means to conceptualize maps.

In fact, a (small?) number of people would not quite accept that cognitive experiments with maps has become moribund, although with the retirement this year of two of its leading practitioners (Bob Lloyd and Ted Steinke) it is easier to make the case (though why 1983?).

Bad-boy Denis Wood gets his own section which produces the following observation from Edney:

In these three studies, Wood set out to puncture what he understands to be academic cartography’s fatuousness. With his consciously un-academic (even anti-academic) prose style, he skewered the academic field’s self-imposed restrictions concerning, respectively, map design and map design research (too dry, too stultifying), the relation of the map to the world (too dry, too pseudo-scientific), and map reading (too dry, too factual). In its place, Wood advocated a discipline that is truly engaged with its subject matter and not intent on defending some parody wrung dry of all color and poetry.

An excellent summary!

This is an updated bib. from his earlier hard to find 1998 version.