Cartography can help us understand how European knowledge of the topography and toponymy of the Delta has evolved over the centuries; however, we must be aware of the intellectual, social, religious and economic conditions under which maps were produced. Their content is far from exclusively geographic and the same map could show many levels of miscellaneous knowledge. Often, no European traveller had ever seen the cities drawn on the map. Consequently, before the nineteenth century, maps of Egypt and the Delta were unstable and contradictory – different maps expressed different Deltas, different representations of the world. The maps discussed in this chapter will paint a picture – a necessarily uncertain, shifting and composite picture – of knowledge acquired on the north of Egypt. This chapter will hopefully be a useful tool for understanding the evolution of European knowledge of the Delta and the research conducted in different places. By providing a list of the main documents, both cartographic and textual, relevant to the evolution of the cartography of the Delta, I hope to make place-specific research possible for those who wish it. It will also allow us to better understand what a thirteenth- or eighteenth-century map can say and not say.

MapReduce is a parallel programming model that follows a simple divide-and-conquer strategy to tackle big datasets in distributed computing. This chapter begins with a discussion of the key distinguishing features and differences of MapReduce with respect to similar distributing computing tools like Message Passing Interface (MPI). Then, we introduce its two main functions, map and reduce, based on functional programming. After that, the notation of how MapReduce works is presented using the classical WordCount example as the Hello World of big data, discussing different ways to parallelize it and their main advantages and disadvantages. Next, we delve into MapReduce a bit more formally, and its functions in terms of key–value pairs, as well as the key properties of the map, shuffle, and reduce operations. At the end of the chapter we cover some important details as to how to achieve fault tolerance, how to exploit MapReduce to preserve data locality, how it can reduce data transfer across computers using combiners, and additional information about its internal working.

This chapter explore the dynamic relationship between two distinct forms of representing urban space. These more or less follow the path of the subject or that of the object, as the more subjective itinerary (i.e., an image of space that emerges from the individual subject’s perception or experience of places) necessarily elides much of what the abstract, apparently objective map (a “God’s-eye view” or “view from nowhere” that established as non-subjective overview) can reveal. Finding one’s way through urban spaces involves something more like an itinerary than a map, the latter involving some sort of supra-subjective perspective, and yet both forms are essential to the experience of metropolitan space. In situating oneself in a given place, and in moving from place to place, one traces out an itinerary that may be more or less useful, but one also must have some more abstract sense of the overall spatial array of which that itinerary is merely one part. Cognitive mapping, in this sense, combines the two at all times. I argue that every literary cartography—every work of creative writing, in fact—of the city must also put into play both modes to create a more dynamic mapping project.

This chapter introduces the readers to the relationship between toponymy and cartography. Although given for granted, place names are an essential component of a map. Toponyms serve important cartographic/topographic functions, such as helping users to search for and to locate places on a map. They also have an affective role; the act of seeing place names on a map evokes an emotional input that (re)connects a person with a place. Both toponyms and maps have the ideological function of possession and control of territories. This is especially true in colonial contexts. The chapter makes a note that maps are not a modern invention; they have been produced since ancient times and, hence, are useful in studying the denominations of old place names and the geopolitical realities of the past. In the final part of this chapter, the authors turn their attention to phantom place names, i.e., places that have been believed to be real and, although charted on maps, turned out to be non-existent. They are part of a broader set of legendary and literary place names that evoke what is called the ‘feeling of place’ and reveal much of the human nature (e.g., the love for exploration and the desire for beauty/earthly pleasures).

The background on how the book came to be is delineated with reference to its general structure and key themes, following five key thoroughfares that anchor distinct parts of New Orleans – Royal Street, St. Claude Avenue, Esplanade Avenue, Basin Street, and St.Charles Avenue – with a final chapter on the outskirts of the city.

Chapter 5, ‘“So Fair a Subterraneous City”: Mapping the Underground’, focuses on map-making and the visualization of the underground. It argues that these developments were deeply linked to broad changes in the political structure of mining regions. Drawing mining maps and working on them became widespread in the second half of the seventeenth century, gradually replacing alternative tools such as written reports of visitations, wood models, or annotated sketches. In Saxony, Captain-general Abraham von Schönberg (1640–1711) put his weight and reputation behind the new cartographic technology, hoping that its acceptance would in turn help him advance his reform agenda. At-scale representations were instrumental in justifying new investments, while offering technical road maps to implement them. Johann Berger (1649–1695) spent years producing a monumental cartographic enterprise, the Freiberga subterranea (1693) to support his patron’s ambitions. As surveyors finally realized the old dream of ‘seeing through stones’, the administrations rapidly seized their skills to reform and police their subterraneous cities.

This chapter considers how the powerfully controversial modernist novelist Joseph Conrad acquired his reputation as the first truly ‘global’ writer. A trilingual Polish expatriate, Conrad’s transnational identity was shaped by – and in turn helped shape our understandings of – a new sense of global interconnectedness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In texts such as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Nostromo, his engagement with what we would now call globalization is bedevilled by paradox and ambivalence. His writing scorns European globetrotters even as it beholds the world via a privileged Western gaze. His innocent fascination with maps is haunted by a guilty awareness of their political and ideological functions. Under no illusions about the vicious impact of European imperialism on non-European cultures, he often represents those cultures as voiceless, one-dimensional and exotically unknowable. Finally, his idealization of the sea as a bracingly pure alternative to the sordid political world of terra firma is steadily undercut by his sense that maritime space has long since been colonized by capitalist modernity.

During the eighteenth century, British publishers capitalized on a growing market for educational toys with board games aimed at teaching geography. These games used maps as game boards, encouraging children to view maps as sites of play. Yet the fixed version of the world presented in a gameboard map was often at odds both with the political realities of the period and with the rapid overturns of chance-driven gameplay. This essay analyses a series of surviving games from the period, illustrating the evolution of the geographical game from an eighteenth-century tool of nationalist propaganda to a more subversive nineteenth-century form that took advantage of board games’ inherent association with chance. In the board game, publishers found a visual form that could unite cartography with unpredictability and that could train players to read maps as stable representations of an unstable world. The mechanism of the game itself – its relationship to chance and unpredictability – ultimately came to be seen as a useful device for structuring the Romantics’ relationship to a world in flux.

In Chapter Eight I continue my theoretical endeavors, this time drawing on a conception of law as a map and offering an analysis of law from the point of view of cartography and its procedures (scale, projection, and symbolization). I concentrate on forms of law, using them as revolving doors through which different forms of power and knowledge circulate. The type of close-up view I am calling for can only be obtained in the context of concrete struggles as they unfold, mobilizing, inventing, confronting, appropriating or rejecting different forms of legality and illegality. The purpose of my analysis is to show that, since the struggles on regulation/emancipation are never fought in general but rather in specific social sites, involving specific issues and social groups, and drawing on specific instrumental and expressive resources, it is of crucial importance and strategic value to understand the limits and the possibilities of the different contexts of struggle, in this particular case, social struggle centered around law, legality and illegality.

This introductory chapter presents a definition of a formal scientific model. The definition is by Baumgärtner et al. (2008) in ecological economics and includes three properties: abstracting from reality, being designed for a certain purpose and being formulated within the concepts of the respective scientific discipline. These three criteria are explained and discussed along everyday examples, in particular a street map.