Article ID: CBB691803189

Zombie projects, negative networks, and multigenerational science: The temporality of the International Map of the World (June 2017)

unapi

Rankin, William Joseph (Author)


Social Studies of Science
Volume: 47
Issue: 3
Pages: 353-375


Publication Date: June 2017
Edition Details: Special issue: Breaking Scientific Networks, edited by Dániel Margócsy, William Rankin, and Sergio Sismondo
Language: English

The International Map of the World was a hugely ambitious scheme to create standardized maps of the entire world. It was first proposed in 1891 and remained a going concern until 1986. Over the course of the project’s official life, nearly every country in the world took part, and map sheets were published showing all but a few areas of the planet. But the project ended quite unceremoniously, repudiated by cartographers and mapping institutions alike, and it is now remembered as a ‘sad story’ of network failure. How can we evaluate this kind of sprawling, multigenerational project? In order to move beyond practitioners’ (and historians’) habit of summarizing the entire endeavor using the blunt categories of success and failure, I propose a more temporally aware reading, one that both disaggregates the (persistent) project from the (always changing) network and sees project and network as invertible, with the possibility of zombie projects and negative networks that can remain robust even when disconnected from their original goals. I therefore see the abandonment of the International Map of the World as resulting from vigorous collaboration and new norms in cartography, not from lack of cooperation or other resources. New categories are required for analyzing science over the long durée.

...More
Included in

Article Dániel Margócsy (June 2017) A Long History of Breakdowns: A Historiographical Review. Social Studies of Science (pp. 307-325). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB691803189/

Similar Citations

Article Dániel Margócsy; (June 2017)
A Long History of Breakdowns: A Historiographical Review (/isis/citation/CBB140526380/)

Article Dunlop, Catherine T.; (2013)
Mapping a New Kind of European Boundary: The Language Border between Modern France and Germany (/isis/citation/CBB001320353/)

Article Andrews, J. H.; (2014)
Where Did They Put Their Maps? The Case of Elizabethan Ireland (/isis/citation/CBB001214460/)

Article Grant, Susan-Mary; Heale, Michael; Parafianowicz, Halina; Vaudagna, Maurizio; (2014)
Characteristics and Contours: Mapping American History in Europe (/isis/citation/CBB001451936/)

Chapter Joaquim Alves Gaspar; (2021)
Navegação e cartografia náutica nos séculos XV e XVI (/isis/citation/CBB517611958/)

Article Lisa Messeri; (February 2017)
Extra-terra incognita: Martian maps in the digital age (/isis/citation/CBB974270108/)

Article Dimitris Papadopoulos; (2015)
From Publics to Practitioners: Invention Power and Open Technoscience (/isis/citation/CBB566152646/)

Article Benjamin W. Goossen; (2020)
A benchmark for the environment: Big science and ‘artificial’ geophysics in the global 1950s (/isis/citation/CBB084524138/)

Book Jacob Doherty; (2021)
Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability (/isis/citation/CBB866747879/)

Article Clarke, Brendan; (2014)
Mapping the Methodologies of Burkitt Lymphoma (/isis/citation/CBB001421648/)

Chapter Karl-Erik Michelsen; (2013)
An Uneasy Alliance: Negotiating Infrastructures at the Finnish-Soviet Border (/isis/citation/CBB153492277/)

Book E. van der Vleuten; P. Högselius; A. Hommels; A. Kaijser; Erik van der Vleuten; (2013)
The Making of Europe's Critical Infrastructure: Common Connections and Shared Vulnerabilities (/isis/citation/CBB085424881/)

Book Marlis Schweitzer; (2015)
Transatlantic Broadway: The Infrastructural Politics of Global Performance (/isis/citation/CBB276062856/)

Article François C. Romijn; (2023)
Negotiating Belgian identity in Wisconsin through ancestry genomics (/isis/citation/CBB760985734/)

Article Gökçe Günel; (2018)
The Backbone: Construction of a Regional Electricity Grid in the Arabian Peninsula (/isis/citation/CBB043986489/)

Article Adrian Deoancă; (December 2020)
(Dis)Connected Rail: Infrastructural Suspension and Phatic Politics in Romania (/isis/citation/CBB551561342/)

Article Mateusz Laszczkowski; (December 2020)
Railway Territorialities: Topology and Infrastructural Politics in Alpine Italy (/isis/citation/CBB092260281/)

Article Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner; (2015)
Infrastructural Inversion as a Generative Resource in Digital Scholarship (/isis/citation/CBB191775615/)

Authors & Contributors
Gökçe Günel
Mateusz Laszczkowski
Katherine Chandler
Karl-Erik Michelsen
Jacob Doherty
Papadopoulos, Dimitris
Concepts
Cross-national interaction
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Infrastructure
Maps; atlases
Technology and society
Cartography
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
20th century, late
19th century
Early modern
Renaissance
Places
United States
Europe
Kampala (Uganda)
Arabian peninsula
Atlantic Ocean
Uganda
Institutions
Gulf Cooperation Council
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment