Card-ography
Episode 1: What Is Space?
This introductory episode asks a deceptively simple question– what is space? – and sets the stage for our collective journey across time and across space to learn about maps, where they came from, why they matter, and how they influence the way we understand the world around us
Episode 2: Finding Yourself
How does your brain know where you are, where you’ve been, and how to get where you’re going? Through the discovery of place cells, grid cells, and other neural systems, scientists have uncovered evidence that the brain constructs its own internal maps of the world.
Episode 3: Space as the Architecture of Thought
Ancient Greek and Roman speakers could memorize enormous speeches by placing ideas inside imagined buildings and mentally walking through them. The technique, known as the memory palace, reveals a connection between memory and spatial organization. This episode explores why spatial thinking appears to be so deeply embedded in the way humans remember and think.
Episode 4: Before Words, Gestures?
What if some of the foundations of language emerged from our ability to communicate spatial relationships? Long before writing, and perhaps even before spoken language, humans may have relied on gestures and other spatial cues to make sense of the world together. This episode explores the gesture-first hypothesis and the hidden spatial structures that still shape communication today.
Episode 5: Different Ways of Knowing Space
The way you think about direction, distance, and location may feel obvious, but not every culture understands space in the same way. This episode explores how different environments, languages, and traditions can produce very different “spatial etiquette”. This reminds us that while humans share the capacity to “think spatially”, the frameworks we use are shaped by culture and personal experience, as well as cognition.
Episode 6: Babylonian Maps
Long before satellites or coordinates, the Babylonians were putting space onto clay tablets. This episode looks at two Babylonian maps — one considered the oldest known property survey, the other often called the oldest surviving world map — and what they reveal about a society learning to measure, own, and make sense of space. Si.427 Tablet Babylonian World Map
Episode 7: Sacred Centers
For most of history, a map’s job wasn’t to get you somewhere, but to explain something important about your place in space. This episode explores two medieval mapping traditions built around sacred centers, and shows how space itself could be organized by belief rather than physical geography. T-O Map Qibla Map
Episode 8: Hierarchies of the World
Not every map is trying to show you what the world looks like, some are trying to show you how it’s ordered. This episode looks at mapping traditions from Japan and Korea where size and placement reflect political power and status. Gyoki-style Map Kangido Map Amalgamated Map of the Ming Empire
Episode 9: Space Through Time
This episode explores mapping traditions where space and time are inseparable, from Roman itinerary maps to the Aztec Codex Mendoza. Paris Itinerary Map Peutinger Map Codex Mendoza
Episode 10: The Grid
Why does the map on your phone still run on math invented in ancient Greece? This episode traces the classical lineage behind our coordinate grid. Reconstruction of Anaximander’s Map Ptolemy’s Geographia
Episode 11: Measured Geography
Ptolemy’s coordinate system vanished from Western Europe for centuries before being rediscovered right as colonial expansion needed it. This episode asks how measured, gridded space became the default, seemingly “neutral” way to represent the world. Fra Mauro’s World Map Sebastian Münster’s map of the Holy Land Christian van Adrichem’s map of Jerusalem
Episode 12: Bounding Space
Once space can be measured, what happens when someone uses that measurement to draw a line and call it a border? This episode introduces territory and territorialization.
Episode 13: Drawing the Line
Not all borders are drawn the same way. This episode contrasts negotiated boundary-making with imposed boundary-making, from the Treaty of Tordesillas to the colonial partition of Africa. Philipp Apian’s Maps of Bavaria Treaty of Tordesillas Jefferson’s Grid Nine-dash Line Map Sykes-Picot Map Colonization of Africa
Episode 14: Governing Space
Why is it easier for a state to govern space than to govern people one at a time? This episode draws on James C. Scott’s idea of “legibility” and Foucault’s reading of the Panopticon to explore the notion of “spatial governance”. Panopticon
Episode 15: Moralizing Maps
What happens when a map diagnoses a neighborhood as the cause of disease, danger, or disorder? This episode traces that pattern across four case studies, from Victorian sanitary maps to American redlining. Sanitary Map of Leeds San Francisco Vice Map Durham Redlining Map Italy Covid Zone Map
Episode 16: Modern Mapping Technology
Two technologies, built independently for different reasons, converged to create the modern map: GPS and satellite imagery. This episode tells the story of how they came together.
Episode 17: The Birth of GIS
This episode tells the twin origin story of geographic information systems, born independently at Harvard and in a Canadian government office. SYMAP
Episode 18: Maps as a Corporate Service
Mapmaking authority has shifted from states to corporations. This episode traces how Google, Apple, and Microsoft absorbed public data into proprietary, lucrative products and what that means for who “owns” the map.
Episode 19: The Algorithmic Nudge
Digital maps are increasingly run by algorithms. This episode explores what that means for how we see and navigate our world.