Publication of my commentary in the Communications from Readers section might be one way for The American Cartographer to affirm a commitment to open… - Mark Monmonier

Nowadays, when I confess to being skeptical about theory, I'm especially concerned that proponents of social criticism of cartography don't really seem to be very committed to communication. They litter their essays with elitist language, which I don't think takes anybody, except maybe them, further down the road toward understanding.

A final caveat: because this book is intended for general readers, academic geographers will notice little reference here to poststructural critical theorists, who've said much about maps in recent years but little about toponyms. Simply put, I've not found their work particularly useful, especially when tedious regurgitation of Foucault crowds out case studies and fosters gratuitous assumptions about power and impact.

Has cartography become GIS? It's a moot point. I guess a lot of people in the GIS arena wouldn't agree that what they are doing is cartography. There's also the annoying tendency among academics to rename things, as occurred when we went from geographic information systems to geographic information science, to geospatial technologies, a term that acknowledges that the important role of GPS and what's called `location-based services'. If you look beyond GIS, you'll see a wider enterprise in which GIS as we know it now (mostly buffering and map overlay) is a relatively small part of macrocartography. But I don't have a crystal ball.