After cycling through a few maps that were either too large scale, or were just plain illegible, I was given this map of a part of Africa. This map was made by the company Air France in 1964, and its age definitely shows both in the accuracy of the map as well as some of the stereotypical depictions of native Africans that are seen on different parts of the map, with a very stereotypical African men wearing minimal clothing and toting a shield and a spear in the center of the map, and women wearing grass skirts and carrying pots on their heads near the bottom. There is also a strong colonial presence in the locations chosen to use as reference points, with primarily forts noted in the top left corner of the Air France map. Before looking at this I did not quite understand how a map could be used to further stereotypes, but this one certainly does so.
Another interesting thing is how off this map is compared to the actual real world map today, which makes me question or respect other, larger, spatial Digital Humanities projects as there is a lot of work that needs to go into making sure these projects are accurate with the real world locations of whatever the focus of the project is. After georectifying a map it is interesting to see what inaccuracies there are, even with a map that is not even sixty years old. However, I have to wonder if part of these strange differences are a part of the software, as some of the differences in the map, such as the Air France map’s version of Madagascar being much longer than the real world map being due to the stretching that happened to fit some other points on African continent. While this is just a free service, so I am sure it does not compare to more advanced softwares for georectifying, it does call into question just how accurate this discipline can be.
