Studying Maps at Scale: A Digital Investigation of Cartography and the Evolution of Figuration
Remi Petitpierre

TL;DR
This study develops large-scale digital methods to analyze the history and cultural significance of maps over six centuries, revealing patterns in geographic focus, political influences, and cartographic figuration.
Contribution
It introduces new datasets, semantic segmentation, and object detection techniques for large-scale cartographic analysis, integrating historical context with visual recognition models.
Findings
Maps reflect political and epistemic expectations.
Land classes show emphasis on features through composition.
Signs form locally consistent systems and reveal figurative shifts.
Abstract
This thesis presents methods and datasets to investigate cartographic heritage on a large scale and from a cultural perspective. Heritage institutions worldwide have digitized more than one million maps, and automated techniques now enable large-scale recognition and extraction of map content. Yet these methods have engaged little with the history of cartography, or the view that maps are semantic-symbolic systems, and cultural objects reflecting political and epistemic expectations. This work leverages a diverse corpus of 771,561 map records and 99,715 digitized images aggregated from 38 digital catalogs. After normalization, the dataset includes 236,925 contributors and spans six centuries, from 1492 to 1948. These data make it possible to chart geographic structures and the global chronology of map publication. The spatial focus of cartography is analyzed in relation to political…
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Taxonomy
TopicsArchaeological Research and Protection · Geographic Information Systems Studies · Historical Geography and Cartography
