Warping Waldseemüller: A Phenomenological and Computational Study of the 1507 World Map

Abstract

The 1507 World Map by Martin Waldseemüller shows, for the first time, a depiction of the New World as a separate landmass detached from Asia. This study compares the outline of South America on the Waldseemüller map using several related computational methods. First, the projection is analysed, modelled, and compared with the modern outline of South America, which is found to be tantalizingly similar in form and location to the 1507 representation. Second, polynomial warping algorithms of the second order are applied to the world map and spatial interpolations are carried out. The newly produced regression surfaces and curves are analysed for inflection-point behaviour, and global and local correlation coefficients are calculated to give some indication of the geometric similarity between the 1507 and modern forms. The shape and location of the South American continent on the 1507 map is chronometrically problematic, since neither Balboa nor Magellan had reached the Pacific Ocean by this time. The study concludes that, based on these interpolations, it is probable that Waldseemüller had geographic information that is no longer extant or has yet to be discovered for his 1507 portrayal of the New World.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.