Long before maps as we know them entered schools, educators used
topographical (or topological) diagrams to provide context to events
described in books or to lay out a basic knowledge of how the world is
organized.[*]In English, topology
is certainly the more appropriate term for reductive descriptions of
places on a surface, as in subway diagrams, whereas topography
has
tended since the nineteenth century to be used in the sense of descriptive
of landscape (topographical dictionary, topographical map,
perhaps as a substitute for the far less familiar chorography).
In this library, topographical will be used in a particular sense (closer
to French, Germany and other languages) to denote diagrams that are
neither chorographic nor geographic.
The portal discusses two types of topographical diagram used in the late antique schools:
From our perspective, a topographical diagram could be described as a
hollowed-out map
in which nothing else but the spatial relationships
between a few selected points is shown.
Diagrams of urban transport systems are the most common topographical charts in use today: they show only the stops, which, to emphasize the sequences and connections and eliminate any other information which might confuse the user, reformulate the routes as smooth lines. The system diagrams name all the points, but do not show true distances or observe any consistent north orientation.
The Library of Latin Diagrams by Jean-Baptiste Piggin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.