The Map Reader

Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation

Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, Chris Perkins, Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, Chris Perkins

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470742839
• eBook ISBN: 9780470980071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Civil Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

WINNER OF THE CANTEMIR PRIZE 2012 awarded by the Berendel Foundation

The Map Reader brings together, for the first time, classic and hard-to-find articles on mapping. This book provides a wide-ranging and coherent edited compendium of key scholarly writing about the changing nature of cartography over the last half century. The editorial selection of fifty-four theoretical and thought provoking texts demonstrates how cartography works as a powerful representational form and explores how different mapping practices have been conceptualised in particular scholarly contexts.

Themes covered include paradigms, politics, people, aesthetics and technology. Original interpretative essays set the literature into intellectual context within these themes. Excerpts are drawn from leading scholars and researchers in a range of cognate fields including: Cartography, Geography, Anthropology, Architecture, Engineering, Computer Science and Graphic Design.

The Map Reader provides a new unique single source reference to the essential literature in the cartographic field:

• more than fifty specially edited excerpts from key, classic articles and monographs
• critical introductions by experienced experts in the field
• focused coverage of key mapping practices, techniques and ideas
• a valuable resource suited to a broad spectrum of researchers and students working in cartography and GIScience, geography, the social sciences, media studies, and visual arts
• full page colour illustrations of significant maps as provocative visual 'think-pieces'
• fully indexed, clearly structured and accessible ways into a fast changing field of cartographic research

Section One

Conceptualising Mapping

Chapter 1.1

Introductory Essay: Conceptualising Mapping

Rob Kitchin, Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins

It is all too easy to think of maps and cartography in a naïve, commonsense way – a map is a two-dimensional, spatial representation of the Earth, and cartography is the creation of such maps. If only it were so simple! The history of cartography reveals a rich engagement with different philosophies of science. As a result, the scholarly understanding of what maps are and the processes, procedures and protocols through which they are created and deployed has changed enormously over time. This has never been more so than over the past fifty years as academics from a broad range of disciplines have focused on conceptualising mapping.

In this section, a broad range of readings are excerpted; they span more than 60 years and have sought to advance how maps and cartography are conceptualised. What unites the thirteen chapters is the common pursuit of rethinking the ontological and epistemological bases of cartography. That is, they each put forward a novel way to conceptualise maps as artefacts and mapping practices, each moving beyond commonsense and naïve understandings to set out a viewpoint that they believe provides a more robust and useful theoretical underpinning. At the time of writing, none of the approaches detailed in the readings is considered hegemonic amongst academics. For some, this conceptual plurality is considered a hindrance because it means that there is no generally accepted way to understand maps, thus introducing uncertainty and undermining the credibility of cartography as a ‘science’, with well-grounded theory and prevailing methods and an established canon. For others, it is a sign of intellectual fervent that has reinvigorated what was arguably becoming an increasingly technical discipline that was progressing largely through technological advances and methodological refinement rather than more philosophical ideas (Crampton 2003).

According to Harvey (1989, excerpted as Chapter 5.2) the first major change in how maps were conceptualised, in a Western context, occurred in the Renaissance through the application of Enlightenment thought and technologies to cartography. Prior to this, knowledge of the geographical world was parochial and documented from multiple perspectives to no formal, universal standards. Areas that were unknown were literally off the map, filled with religious cosmology and figures of myth and imagination. Maps were understood more as reminders – as spatial stories – than as scientific representations of the world based on surveyed data (Ingold 2000). Replacing the piecemeal frameworks of medieval cartography was the adoption of a single, universal system of measuring and representing the world that used perspectivism and Cartesian rationality, underpinned by notions of objectivity, functionality and ordering. This perspective understood space and time in quite different ways to the medieval period, and the resulting transformation in cartographic thinking made the world knowable, navigable and claimable, for a privileged and powerful few, through a shared framework of scientific endeavour that was translatable across peoples and places (see Latour 1992, excerpted as Chapter 1.9). In the centuries that followed, the science of cartography – wherein maps provided objective, truthful representations of the spatial relations of the world – was refined through improvements in surveying and mapping techniques and the development of a set of established principles of design and aesthetics.

Attempts to historicise the nature of (Western) cartography through categorisations of map forms and taxonomies based on purpose, often implicitly use the notion of evolutionary advancement driven by technological development. The end result narrates cartography as a beneficent pursuit, characterised by improving accuracy and comprehensiveness with each new generation of map. Examples of this conceptualisation are quite common in the literature, such that ‘[t]he normative history of cartography is a ceaseless massaging of this theme of noble progress’ (Harley 1989 : 4). For example, Crone (1953 : xi) notes, ‘[t]he history of cartography is largely that of the increase of accuracy with which . . . elements of distance and direction are determined and the comprehensiveness of the maps’ content.' Histories of cartography in this tradition were histories of techniques, with an underlying assumption that rational decision making leads to the adoption of improved technologies and institutional practices when they become available. The result is that cartographic development can be conceptualised as a ‘tree’ with evolving complexity of mapping (Figure 1.1.1).

Figure 1.1.1 Cartography explained as a ‘story of progress’. Mapping is shown to evolve over time with the development of increasingly complex forms.

(Source: Redrawn from Robinson et al. 1995 : 22.)

The apparent ‘naturalness’ of this account belies the politics behind the progressive conceptualisation of the development of cartography from a primitive past to the sophisticated present (Edney 1993, excerpted as Chapter 1.10). The underlying goal of this kind of construction of cartographic history – achievable only through a carefully selective reading of extant map artefacts – is to ‘prove’ that the objectivity of current scientific methods is predestined. It grants an important legitimisation to the positivist notion of contemporary professional cartography as the ‘best’ and provides a discursive mechanism to dismiss maps that do not fit ‘acceptable’ scientific standards. Scientific worldviews see technological progress almost like a force of nature that somehow operates outside society and beyond the political concerns of money, power and ego. The way one approaches cartographic history is therefore worthy of consideration, as it is at the heart of the recent political theorisation of cartography and directly informs our understanding of the nature of the map and contemporary positivistic epistemological foundations of cartography (including much of the work on online mapping and GIScience).

This Cartesian rationality still predominates the general understanding of maps. However, over the last half century or so there has been a fresh engagement between cartography and philosophy that has either sought to refine and advance scientific cartography, or has sought to challenge and reconfigure its ontological and epistemological underpinnings. The first of these engagements by Ernest Raisz (1938) and Arthur Robinson and colleagues (Robinson 1952; Robinson and Petchenik 1976; excerpted as Chapters 1.3 and 3.3) sought to provide formalised rules and principles of map design, drawing on a range of disciplines such as mathematics and psychology. These approaches tended to see cartography as a blend of art and science, but where the aesthetic elements could be formalised through colour and visual theory and thus made more effective. Robinson, in particular, sought to advance a communications model approach that drew inspiration from psychology and information theory, and which sought to foreground the fact that maps serve as communication devices. As such, cartographic research needed to be framed around the goal of effective communication, wherein maps capture and portray information in a way that an idealised map reader could easily and intuitively analyse and interpret. Here, the aims of the cartographer were framed normatively to reduce error in the representation and to increase map effectiveness through appropriate design. Research thus sought to improve map designs by carefully controlled scientific experimentation that focused on issues such as: how to represent location, direction and distance; how to select information; how best to symbolise these data; how to combine these symbols together; and what kind of map to publish.

Robinson's ideas were extended and developed by others such as Joel Morrison (1976, excerpted as Chapter 1.4) and Christopher Board (1981, excerpted as Chapter 1.6). These scholars sought to forward the communication model as the new dominant paradigm for academic cartographic research, producing increasingly sophisticated conceptual models of how maps worked. Links were forged with cognitive scientists and behavioural geographers interested in cognitive mapping and how maps were learnt and people used and interpreted maps (Downs and Stea 1973; Lloyd 2000; excerpted are Chapters 4.3 and 4.9). Morrison, for example, envisaged cartography developing as ‘communications science’ with researchers working to understand the structural transmission of mapped information from data collection through to map use – including the science of data classification, generalisation, symbolisation and so on – in order to develop more effective cartographic syntax and grammar suitable for a given situation. By the early 1980s, Board was able to provide an overview of different information flow models, which by that stage had started to engage with the ideas of semiology.

Whilst Anglo-American cartographic researchers were examining the communicative properties of maps from a functional and pragmatic perspective, French academics were examining the utility of semiology – the study of signs and symbols – for map design. This work was based principally on the influential work of Jacques Bertin (1967) on graphic design (the 1983 English translation is excerpted as Chapter 1.2). Bertin set out what he saw as key properties of graphic systems and a set of rules for their presentation founded on a semiological analysis of the presentation of information in graphic form. These rules were influential in informing map design, and the science of semiology became an important touchstone for Anglo-American researchers in the late 1980s and early 1990s seeking to move beyond the limitations of the communications model. A semiological approach elided the divide between mapmaker and reader that underpinned communications theory. Technological advances were already exposing this divide as a fiction by the late 1980s and communication theory also failed to recognise the social and cultural aspects of mapping. A representational theory of cartography offered a more useful and practical grounding for scientific research. For example, MacEachren (1995) sought to blend cognitive and semiotic approaches, along with visualisation theory, to provide a coherent picture of how maps worked. Such work became influential amongst those working in GIScience and geovisualisation seeking ways to scientifically conceptualise and improve mapping within increasingly exploratory and interactive media. This new representational orthodoxy is borne out in research agendas of the geovisualisation community (MacEachren and Kraak 1997, excepted as Chapter 1.11) and in emerging work in multimedia cartography (Cartwright 1999, excerpted as Chapter 2.11).

A different challenge to cartographic theory emerged at the end of the 1980s, however. The communications model and its subsequent offshoots are still framed within a scientific rationality that sought to produce objective, ‘value free’, accurate representations. In a landmark paper, Brian Harley (1989, excerpted as Chapter 1.8) argued that, far from presenting the truth of the world, maps were social constructions presenting subjective versions of reality. Harley was by then a well-established scholar in the history of cartography, able to draw on a wealth of empirical material. He built on an emerging critical tradition, dating back to research from John Kirkland Wright in the 1940s (Wright 1942, excerpted as Chapter 4.2). Although there is a long history of analysis examining the role of maps in society, and the part they have played as cultural artefacts in political and economic development of nations and empires, including the ‘persuasive cartography’ of propaganda maps (Tyner 1974), Harley changed the tenor of such analysis by focusing on the power of maps and the power invested in maps. Drawing on the ideas of Foucault and Derrida, Harley argued that maps are a product of the society that creates them, and regardless of how much they seek to represent ‘the truth’, they inherently capture the interests of those that produced them and work to further those interests. Such a position recognises that in the production of maps many subjective decisions are made about what to include, how the map will look, and what the map is seeking to communicate. As such, maps are the product of power and they exert power, and therefore in any theory or history of cartography it is necessary to be mindful of the historical and social context in which mapping has been employed and to deconstruct the power relations inherent within its production. His goal was to ‘subvert the apparent naturalness and innocence of the world shown in maps both past and present’ (Harley 1992 : 232).

Harley's ideas opened the floodgates for a re-imagining of cartography and maps, and a re-examination of works that had been suggesting such a reorientation but had, at that time, received little attention. Shortly after its publication other significant pieces by Pickles (1991, excerpted as Chapter 5.3) and Wood (1992) were published. Wood's book, The Power of Maps, drew together and extended a number of his works published over the previous decade (see the 1986 Wood and Fels' article ‘Designs on Signs’, excerpted as Chapter 1.7). Wood, drawing on linguistic structural thought and Barthean semiotics sought to detail how maps worked as a complex sign system, through their design and structuring, to produce certain versions of truth in order further the interests of those that created them. ‘No sooner are maps acknowledged as social constructions than their contingent, their conditional, their . . . arbitrary character is unveiled. Suddenly the things represented by these lines are open to discussion and debate, the interest in them of owner, state, insurance company is made apparent’ (Wood 1992 : 19). Maps from this perspective are always political, working to (re)produce certain ways of thinking about the world. Rather than drawing on semiology, Pickles (1991, excerpted as Chapter 5.3) argued for a hermeneutic reading of maps t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Copyright Notice
• The Editors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Colour Plate One: Cartographic Production (On the inside front cover)
• Section One: Conceptualising Mapping
• Section Two: Technologies of Mapping
• Section Three: Cartographic Aesthetics and Map Design
• Section Four: Cognition and Cultures of Mapping
• Section Five: Power and Politics of Mapping
• Index