From one to multiple and return : Automobile routes and maps from paper to screen
Résumé
Route specific maps are widely used today under their digital form, the main characteristics that make the use of such maps easy if that they are portable, geolocalized and dynamic. Drawing mainly on American examples, this communication will question the uses and diffusion of route specific maps for automobile travel from the 20th to the 21st century in regards to their materiality.
I will show how the place of route specific maps evolved from the first automobile road guides to the use of online maps on mobile digital devices. Early examples of road guides will show that route maps were widely used at the beginning of the automobile era, accounts of the number of maps published in collections such as the Automobile Blue Books will show that the publication of these maps dropped due to portability reasons. Network road maps tend to replace route specific maps during most of the 20th century, being more detailed and more easily movable. Itineraries have, then, often be limited to specific purposes and many of those maps were inserted on larger road maps. Although attempts have been made to facilitate the use of paper route maps by making them more easily transportable (French 1995, 2006), it’s only with digital technologies that this efficiency has been made possible. Thus, digital puts itineraries back on the maps, but under a new form and their distribution is much wider than that of their paper counterparts.
Comparing the uses and dissemination of route maps will finally lead us to question the consequences of the transition from paper maps to screen maps and how it modifies the nature of maps.