Now, Simon Greenhill, a linguist at Australian National University in Canberra, is trying to remedy that situation, by gathering together hundreds of thousands of words from published surveys, book chapters, and articles, as well as the accounts of early European explorers, and putting them into an online database called TransNewGuinea.org.
But all surveys – books or maps – are by nature selective, and On the Map is a survey of some of the most intriguing and thought-provoking moments in map history, narrated with a level of detail, colour and liveliness of which the most ambitious mapmaker would be proud.
"Today it is banking and financial services, so I read articles, blogs, reports, surveys, books even about the future of banking," he noted.
I pulled out my old H. W. Janson survey book.
He is, with Marty Fischler, co-author of a survey book in the topic.
Her first survey book and exhibition, In History (Steidl, 2008), was produced with the International Center for Photography.
Among the households surveyed, book sharing was lowest in Hispanic families and households with both parents foreign-born.
The past year, especially, has been a boom time for the genre, with a Museum of London exhibition and a major survey book, Street Photography Now, on the subject.
Arsenault flipped to a few pages in Granville's first town survey book to convey the difficulty involved in interpreting these old coördinates.
When I studied United States history in high school, there were two assigned texts: a survey book and J. Edgar Hoover's "Masters of Deceit".
For those seeking such guidance, one of the more useful sites is www.zagat.com, the online arm of the popular survey book series.
