We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This chapter investigates the development of mapping for blind and low-vision people in France and Britain. Originally handmade for a wealthy few, tactile maps attracted the attention of eighteenth-century French intellectuals who strategically employed them to challenge the assumption that vision was necessary to the formation of civilized personhood. Blind people interacting with tangible maps of various forms and media became, in depictions aimed at the sighted, potent images of tactual subjectivity and participation in the public sphere. Beginning with Denis Diderot’s account of handcrafted maps in his Addition to the Letter on the Blind and concluding with the Scottish educator John Alston’s 1839 printed tactile map of the British Isles, Carlson shows how maps read with the fingers spurred a democratic educational movement that spread from France to America and to Britain, and, in recasting personhood, society, and nation, helped to change the status of blind people around the globe. Valentin Haüy’s embossed Essay on the Education of the Blind (1786), discussing the use of tangible maps at the world’s first school for blind children, and its translation by blind poet Thomas Blacklock, helped establish cartoliteracy as a key component of literacy and social integration.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.