Matthew is generally interested in all things cartographic, but especially map history. With work wrapping up on Cartography in the European Enlightenment, Volume 4 of The History of Cartography, he is pursuing a number of issues concerning the “ideal of cartography,” which is to say the body of concepts and presumptions that govern how people think about maps and mapping. These issues include: how the ideal developed; how it has shaped map studies generally, and map history in particular; how map scholars have failed to break free of the ideal, despite 50 years of debate; and how they might pursue an alternative approach to understanding the processes underpinning the many modes of mapping.
