[oldmapgallery]

We come at this from a strange perspective, as we dealt in old maps for the last thirty years or so, mostly paper, but on occasion things on silk, cotton or rayon.

It's an amazing non-proprietary technology, paper. Even things that are water damaged over the centuries, or obscured by foxing (a kind of staining), many times can be reversed and brought back to a clean state(we've worked some near miracles ourselves on some 18th century maps just recently). Without vulnerability to bit-flip, or cosmic rays compromising the data and rendering a work useless and corrupt, paper is lo-tech and easily enduring.

The paper map also enables a comprehensive view of the subject at many different scales, without having to move a cursor, pinch or expand... none of that, your eyes just take in and adjust. The benefit is an understanding of context and relationship. When we do presentations at schools it always interests us that there is a fragmented understanding of how things relate for some students, which almost feels like an artifact of digital cartography. In a digital world the constant zooming in an out, first to find the greater region, and then to reach down into the detail of a street or land feature. The problem is at that tight detailed scale, it's hard to see how it relates to much of its surroundings. You can push around at that detailed level and form some understanding, but it feels abstract, especially for those that don't have the best visual memory. The paper map affords a certain level of pattern recognition at different scales of detail without constant enlarging and reorienting.

We have maps going as far back as the late 15th century with the matrix of the paper being made of nothing more than cotton fiber, not gold or titanium, just simple cotton. When we read of the challenge of preserving the digital world and the technological progress of our species, it does concern us that even the best storage technologies available might reach 100 years or so.

Timothy O'Reilly in a talk a few years ago mentioned the danger of how technology can be lost. He mentioned how the great church, Hagia Sophia was the largest building on earth for about 1000 years, but then there was a long pause before anything came close to its stature again, almost as if the technical understanding of how to build at that scale was lost. In an era where almost everything is developed, distributed and saved in a digital format, perhaps we should print more hard copies, not just for backup purposes, but maybe for the unique perspective that that simple 2 dimensional surface can supply.