On Thursday April 4, the renowned historian Patricia Seed, University of California - Irvine, gave conference "Mapping the world tour" in the auditorium of the Department of Anthropology at the University Autónoma de Yucatán. Professor Seed has been studying the Mercator map, tracing the places from which they come paper, calculations, geographical knowledge and graphic design of this famous document.
According to Dr. Seed, it is impossible to know for sure exactly what data were used to compile the map, but she believes the author was based on the knowledge that time had only a handful of excellent Portuguese cartographers, who then processed the information came from the English and Portuguese voyages around the world. Dr. Seed applied a Mercator map algorithm to determine the degree of accuracy with which various parts of the world are represented in that letter, and found that the closest information to which we have is the one shown, indeed, for the places then carrying the English and Portuguese ships.
Dr. Seed also presented several maps from the same period and close times. He explained that the cartographers of the time they put false information on their maps so that if someone could copy them realize the forgery. He explained that many mapmakers copied maps that were not theirs, but with the destruction of a large map collection in Lisbon in 1755 because of a terrible tsunami and a great fire, lots of original maps have disappeared and is now very difficult to know whether which there are originals or are copies.
the end of the conference, several teachers and students of our faculty asked him questions. It was a fascinating conference that left us thinking about the importance of graphic representations, especially maps, to our world view. The maps have partial information, and even wrong, but without them many of the current history has not been written. As noted by Jose Luis Borges, the only way to have a perfect map would do the exact size of reality, and that point would become an information overload, and therefore would be useless.
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