Introduction: Why Cartographic Humanities?

The humanities have been part of geographical knowledge and its expression for centuries, finding in maps and cartographic imaginations useful and intimate companions to reflect with, challenge and advance new spatial paradigms, methods and metaphors. After the more recent rise of the ‘spatial turn’ in the arts and humanities and the proliferation of digital technologies in several cultural domains, new research areas such as spatial digital humanities, geohumanities, deep mapping and map art, to name a few, have shown that the engagements of scholars and practitioners with cartography and mapping practices have expanded further, becoming increasingly diverse and highly mutable. In parallel to the growing fascination with cartography that arose within various humanistic fields, in the last 15 years, we have witnessed the emergence of ‘map studies’ as a transversal research area that is strongly affected by humanistic approaches and methodologies. This area intersects not only more established traditions such as the history of cartography and critical cartography but also the multifaceted realm of ‘cultural cartography’ (Cosgrove, 2008). The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities is precisely designed to explore the intersection and convergence between cultural map studies and the humanities, expressing multifaceted traditions and inclinations coming from different disciplinary, geographical and cultural contexts.