|
Oxford Atlas maps out a fresh perspective
(Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The (KRT)) The surface of the Aral Sea, which has been shrinking since 1960, is now 50 percent smaller because nature has not been able to keep up with the pace of irrigation. And over in the Far East, a portion of the South China Sea called Penny's Bay, is gone _ filled in for Hong Kong Disneyland, which opened last fall.
I don't know why I find all this interesting. But such tidbits of information were enough to keep me enthralled one recent evening with the new deluxe edition of the Oxford Atlas of the World. Try it, as I did. Lug that 10-pound beautiful volume to bed, prop it up on your lap, and leaf through its 561 pages. If you are at all interested in the world and how it is changing _ and being changed _ you'll be as fascinated with this large book as I was.
For one thing, the images, especially the satellite views of the Earth, are endlessly beautiful, gallery-quality art. The Rhone Delta in France glows in purples and pinks and deep greens; Buenos Aires is a sprawl of pale pink squares bordered by a Prussian blue ocean; the vegetation in Imperial Valley in the United States and Mexico jumps out as hot red squares in the false-color image.
For another, there are the 87 pages that discuss such topics as the water, vegetation, climate, health, trade and conflicts of our globe. (Did you know Italy has the highest number of doctors per 100,000 people? And that Iceland is the biggest user of the Internet relative to its population?)
And like its illustrious rival National Geographic's mega atlas, which was published earlier this year, this Oxford edition also presents a fascinating map of worldwide population migration, voluntary and involuntary; it even charts the immigration patterns of the United States.
The Oxford Atlas, I noticed, is exceptionally current. New border disputes, new names, new streets are all depicted. The result is a synopsis of the geo-political and other changes in the world right up to 2005.
It made me think about the work involved in updating and producing such a book, and curious, I called its editor, Benjamin Keene, at his Madison Avenue office in New York the next day.
Keene is a 28-year-old with an undergraduate degree in anthropology and Spanish from Kenyon College in Ohio. He started working at the Oxford University Press five years ago in the reference department and took over atlas production duties when the person who was doing it was promoted.
"I found these books quite a lot of fun to work on," he said. "I've been happy. I seem to have chosen something that was a good match."
The university press, which has been producing atlases of various kinds _ geographic, religious and other kinds _ for about 15 years and sells about 30,000 of them each year, updates its main atlas every year. But this edition of its flagship atlas is considerably more meaty.
"For this year, we have not only updated it but have actually expanded the size of the book; we've gone up almost 100 pages," Keene said. "This includes a lot of brand new maps that haven't appeared in any of our books before. Part of it is because of world events.
"We decided, for example, that with all the attention on Asia lately, we needed better coverage. And we also added new sections of map for the U.S. and Australia because those are large areas of English-speaking populations who would read our atlas. In Asia, take Taiwan. We now have something that has been absent from all atlases in print: a full-page map of Taiwan. We felt it merited a full page."
Newsworthy events, such as the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean, are charted through a map.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is highlighted by mapping the security fence in the West Bank. Borders in dispute, such as the one over parts of Kashmir between India and Pakistan, and between India and China, are shown with dotted lines.
Keene has added a section on immigration, and checked and updated such figures as the number of refugees worldwide.
It is, he allowed, "rather a time-consuming thing."
Keene also needs to be in tune with national sensitivities.
For instance, as the English are prone to do, Oxford (it's an English press) used to identify the Persian Gulf as "the Gulf." Uh-oh. Many Iranians who are ethnically Persian took offense. The Oxford Atlas now calls that body of water the Persian Gulf.
"These are the kinds of things that might not make the nightly news, but they are important and they affect large numbers of people. So we try to be as fair and sensitive as possible," Keene said.
He stays on top of these sensitivities and national changes by checking regularly with the Board of Geographic Names, a government board whose sole job is to track and approve name changes around the world.
He also hobnobs with cartographers, geographers and others in the map-making trade.
For this deluxe edition, Oxford had 10 cartographers working full time on maps for three to four years.
Others were collecting material and statistics for the text. Oxford's British headquarters already had a vast database of maps and other information. Hundreds of layers of data are laid upon one another.
So, if a name has to be changed, the map makers call up the layer that contains only place names and make the changes.
Original maps come from government surveying agencies. And much information, especially fractional topographical changes, is gathered by increasingly sophisticated satellites.
"Our head cartographer was saying that it's been 10 years since anyone has had to draw a map by hand," Keene noted.
Then he verbalized what I was thinking:
"The thing I think is important or valuable about atlases is that I think of them as more than a collection of maps _ it's almost like several books in one. It's quite interesting for me to follow these things at least in a small way, because it does tell you, just by looking at an atlas, a lot about what's happening out there in the world."
This deluxe atlas, with an accompanying free, six-month subscription to Oxford Reference Online, retails for $150. It's money well spent.
___
(c) 2005, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Visit JSOnline, the Journal Sentinel's World Wide Web site, at http://www.jsonline.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.
[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
|
TMCnet LOGIN
Webinars
