Immersion in Print. Design, Sensory Reading, and Spatial Imaginaries in Nineteenth-Century Chorography - Molly C. Briggs

Nineteenth-century pictorial place maps invited viewers to understand geography through practical and imaginative exploration. Circular examples combined plan view, pictorial perspective, and cartographic projection in graphics that positioned viewers within arguments about the global significance of particular places. Unlike visual distortions that required correction with optical tools, these artifacts were designed to be read and understood through learned period habits of looking and handling. Their call to haptic interaction activated a synthesis of vision and touch that produced felt sensations of presence in place. Early application of these strategies in military and scientific imaging advanced political and epistemic claims about how territory should be seen, interpreted, and governed. Printed orientation plans to panoramic exhibitions popularized this graphic strategy with mass audiences at the turn of the nineteenth century. This approach was then deployed in a variety of other ephemera including travel guides, advertisements, educational games, political posters, and fire-spotting discs. 

The persuasive agency of immersive chorographic (place) maps resided in their coordination of word, image, and material affordance. Arraying text labels for 360-degree viewing and reading helped naturalize contested visions of sovereignty, territory, and belonging through subjective orientation. Immersion in Print traces the development of this immersive rhetoric, and the manners of looking and reading it cultivated, in Europe and the United States. The book intervenes in debates on intermediality, reproduction, and the material life of images by repositioning printed place maps and related ephemera as media environments that actively organized embodied experience and spatial ideology in the long nineteenth century.