Cartography is the science and/or practice of drawing maps. From the French cartographie (combining carte, card or map, and -graphie, denoting drawing), it refers to the theorization and execution of spatial representation, a practice that dates back to antiquity and works such as Eratosthene's Geographika (c.200 BC). In cartography, spatial data is usually articulated in visual form in images of the earth's surface, either as a whole or of its constituent parts, in an attempt to make the world knowable. Recently, however, cartography has been mobilized to explore other territories, in the production of cognitive maps in psychology, for example, or of ‘affective geographies’ in cultural studies (Bruno 2002; and also affect). In this regard, the vocabulary associated with mapping has passed into widespread metaphorical and vernacular usage, so that now ‘[a] dministrators and politicians “map strategy”, teachers use “an English curriculum map” and diplomats follow a “road map” toward peace’ (Akerman and Karrow 2007, 2).

Whether as a science, conceptual tool or figurative vocabulary, cartography is fundamental to travel writing: maps are indispensable for travellers’ negotiation of the world (with their very creation, and absence, motivating journeys ancient and new), and they have become familiar illustrative features of guides and travel books. While ordinarily of secondary importance to the prose, these visual ‘surrogates of space’ (Robinson and Petchenik 2011, 18) often possess a degree of (inter)textual and aesthetic complexity that belies their purported simplicity as ‘non-narrative’ plans in and outside travel writing. Indeed, as Carl Thompson (2011, 25) (following Zweder von Martel) suggests in a discussion of that genre, ‘insofar as they are artfully constructed representations of the world that are often ideologically charged and laden with larger cultural meanings […] one might plausibly include maps […] as a form of travel writing’ (emphasis in the original).

Cartography, to the extent that it creates tools to provide an understanding of political, social, economic and geographical relationships, simplifies the real to make the representation of space accessible and legible to a map's users.