Object-Oriented Cartography

Maps as Things

Tania Rossetto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138346154
• eBook ISBN: 9780429794056
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Object-Oriented Cartography provides an innovative perspective on the changing nature of maps and cartographic study. Through a renewed theoretical reading of contemporary cartography, this book acknowledges the shifted interest from cartographic representation to mapping practice and proposes an alternative consideration of the 'thingness' of maps.

Rather than asking how maps map onto reality, it explores the possibilities of a speculative-realist map theory by bringing cartographic objects to the foreground. Through a pragmatic perspective, this book focuses on both digital and nondigital maps and establishes an unprecedented dialogue between the field of map studies and object-oriented ontology. This dialogue is carried out through a series of reflections and case studies involving aesthetics and technology, ethnography and image theory, and narrative and photography.

Proposing methods to further develop this kind of cartographic research, this book will be invaluable reading for researchers and graduate students in the fields of Cartography and Geohumanities.

1 (Re)Turning to cartographic things

As the title suggests, this book started with the idea of engendering a dialogue between map theory and the current of thought known as ‘object-oriented ontology’ (OOO), a branch of the philosophical movement known as ‘speculative realism’ that emerged in 2010 (see Chapter 2). In exploring potential ways of developing this dialogue, the book draws likewise from a precedent, wider interdisciplinary literature that is now frequently labelled as ‘object-oriented’ in general terms. The established field of ‘object studies’ (Candlin and Guins 2009) seems somehow to have been revamped by the philosophical solicitations deriving from OOO. Despite theoretical distances and failed conversations, eclectic and experimental endeavours to engage with recently emerged object-oriented philosophy are increasingly enacted from within different disciplinary perspectives. As an example of an unexpected and creative theoretical mixing, OOO has been recently considered as a profitable intellectual framework for popular culture studies to investigate the popular life of things (Malinowska and Lebek 2017). As OOO is critical towards a view of the world as culturally constructed, the phrase ‘speculative cultural studies’ (Czemiel 2017), with its oxymoronic association of cultural studies with speculative realism, is indeed referring to the degree of theoretical blend we are experiencing today.

In a review (and critique) of the turn to things in the humanities and social sciences, Fowles (2016) defined object-oriented philosophy as the offspring of a broader move towards the material and the non-human, initiated in the 1990s. Fowles noted this move towards things as marked by the following: The landmark volume The Social Life of Things edited by Arjun Appadurai in 1986; the emergence of the field of material culture studies; the popularity of Bruno Latour’s post-humanist advocacy for a democracy extended to things; the inauguration of ‘thing theory’ in literary studies and archaeology; and the more recent extended work on materiality. Fowles reported that two standard motivations are generally evoked to explain this turn to things. On the one hand, object-oriented research may be seen as symptomatic of a general weariness with social constructivism and post-modern anti-realism. On the other hand, object-oriented research may be seen as a realist attitude in response to a new demand of attention from an object world characterised by such phenomena as global warming, viral images, and terrorism. Notably, similar important motivations of a turn to things can be found also within OOO. According to Fowles, the turn towards things is increasingly discussed as a matter of ontology rather than epistemology: It is an interrogation on how the material world is (or what it does), rather than on how it is interpreted (by humans). Moreover, this turn is increasingly losing the objective of illuminating the human (and the social) through the object while focusing much more on the non-human side of the mutual constitution between objects and subjects. Whereas the ‘methodological fetishism’ proposed by Appadurai – that is, the effort of following things themselves – was ‘about how inanimate objects constitute human subjects’ (Brown 2001, p. 7), the present ontological research attempts to grasp imaginatively (or speculatively) the life of objects from a less anthropocentric point of view and ‘to at least acknowledge a fully autonomous reality without the tinge of human subjectivity’ (Czemiel 2017, p. 44). Objects, therefore, are less employed as heuristic devices to illuminate their human and social context and much more revered as autonomous entities with their own alien phenomenology. ‘Things that act, perceive, feel, and desire – this is quite a different methodological fetishism than what Appadurai had in mind, but it is a natural extension of a line of inquiry in which the lives of things assume center stage’, as Fowles (2016, p. 21) described it. To come to cartography, does this line of inquiry impact cartographic research?

Maps have long been researched in their objecthood and material consistency through many different approaches. The very materiality of cartographic objects has been widely explored within the study of historical cartography, archival research, and cartographic theorisation characterised by a historical attitude. In The Sovereign Map, a volume originally published in French in 1992, historian Jacob suggested that although ‘maps establish a new space of visibility by their distancing of the object and their replacement of it by a representational image’, the map is primarily an object in itself whose effects ‘result from its materiality, from the specific pragmatics of its viewer’s body and gaze’ (Jacob 2006, pp. 2, 8). Jacob’s exploration of cartography started precisely by questioning the nature of the cartographic object. In asking ‘What is a map?’ he stressed that the difficulty in answering reveals how the cartographic object eludes definitions:

The nature of the map can be specified only by referring in an immediate way to what it represents – that is, to what it is not. The difficulty is revealing. Like written or spoken language, in its everyday or scientific uses a map hardly drawn attention to itself. The condition of its intellectual and social uses lies precisely in this transparency, in the absence of ‘noise’ that would otherwise interfere with the process of communication […]. It vanishes in the visual and intellectual operation that unfolds its content.

(Jacob 2006, p. 11)

By focusing on the raw materials of maps in the first part of his book, Jacob reviewed and reflected on ephemeral maps, concrete maps, and the wide variety of material formats in past and present cartography (excluding more recent digital devices). Arriving to some tentative definitions, Jacob concluded that the map is ‘an object likely to be materialized in many ways’, ‘a materialization of the “view of the world” by means of a projection in two or three dimensions on any given medium’ (pp. 98–99). He continued: ‘But the map is never an isolated object independent of a desire to communicate, of the transmission of knowledge, and of a semiotic intent in the broad sense of the term’ (p. 101). Thus, the objecthood and material existence of cartography here is profoundly joined to its nature of a communication device and informational image.

The archival, historical approach focuses on the cartographic artefact not only to describe its material consistency or trace its material history but also to capture its ideological content and political function in a critical vein. This is the case, to make an example, of the historical and archival research carried out by Barber and Harper (2010) in the exhibition Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art held at the British Library in 2010. Focused on modern-age Europe, the exhibition considered how magnificent mural/wall maps are exposed in typical settings, such as palaces, the Secretary of State’s office, the merchant’s or the landowner’s house, and the schoolroom. Here, the wall map object, with its impressive material qualities and huge size, is researched as a major cultural medium displayed to convey messages of power. In a less ideological vein and through a 3D approach (as pointed out by Della Dora 2005), in The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography and Politics in Renaissance Italy, Fiorani (2005) analysed the famous map cycle in the Guardaroba Nuova of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio and the Vatican’s Gallery of Geographic Maps as three-dimensional realities that are embedded in material spaces and with which physical interactions are allowed. More rarely, historians have devoted themselves to less magnificent cartographic materialities, researching, for instance, maps as consumer goods, ornamental objects, and merchandise intended for personal use. In a wide-ranging study on the contribution of cartographic objects to the development of capitalist economies and identities in Europe and the United States since the Renaissance, art historian Dillon (2007) reviewed such items as deluxe cartographic objects intended as gifts, household decoration or public display pieces, popular travelling map objects in the hands of tourists, specialised items featuring maps, embroidered maps as cartographic souvenirs, toys, and billboards. More recently, in The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860, Brückner (2017) offered an accurate account of the rise of maps as best-selling and culturally influential quotidian products in mid-18th- to mid-19th-century America. By analysing cartographic objects, such as school maps, giant wall maps, or miniature maps, with a material culture approach, Brückner demonstrated how the very materiality and material life of maps transformed them into sociable objects affecting commodity circulation, graphic and decorative arts, cultural performances, and social communication (see also Brückner 2016). Elsewhere, by analysing the genre of commercial pocket maps emerging in 18th-century British America, Brückner (2011) explicitly laid in dialogue the critical work carried out within ‘thing studies’ (e.g. centrality of objects, biographies of things, literary adaptations of things as it-narratives) with respect to the cartographic domain. In calling for the study of the relationship of maps and their life as material objects, he combined an innovatively theoretical statement on the ‘thingness of maps’ (Brückner 2011, p. 147) with refined empirical historical analyses.

An interest in the materiality of maps is then clearly expressed by more technical, design-centred approaches. The material carrier of the map is fundamental for its usability/readability. For example, when considering the colouring of maps, the very materiality of the cartographic product becomes crucial. Handmade, printed, or digital maps originate very different end-use environment types. For example, the ColorBrewer tool, an interactive colour selection tool freely accessible on the internet initially developed in 2001, provides specific advice on the end-use environment for the final cartographic product by indicating if the proposed colour scheme is laptop LCD display, colour laser print, or photocopy friendly. Indeed, the digital shift, far from diminishing the importance of the material carriers of maps, has put a new emphasis on the material aspects of map design:

Whilst maps have always been displayed in different ways and through different media, recently there has been multiplication in display formats and the context in which the map operates. For example, the same map will be read in very different ways if it is printed, folded, projected, mounted in situ in a ‘You are Here’ format, displayed in an exhibition, deployed as a graphic in association with other printed materials, displayed on a television screen, or a web site, or on a small screen of a mobile device or satnav system.

(Perkins, Dodge and Kitchin 2011, pp. 197–198)

The objecthood of cartography is often considered in relation to map design and the efficiency or ergonomics of map products. There is also a specific cognitive interest in the objecthood of maps. As a cognitive device, the map has material qualities that affect its cognitive work (Figure 1.1).

Wayfinding and spatial navigation have been innovatively researched through a practice-based perspective through empirical ethno-methodological investigation, field studies of map use, and observation of map objects in action. The navigational object, for instance, has been followed as a rotating thing in the hands of rotating readers (Laurier and Brown 2008). Paper and digital wayfinding/navigational artefacts have been compared from a cognitive (Field, O’Brien and Beale 2011) and more-than-cognitive perspective (Axon, Speake and Crawford 2012; Duggan 2017). More recently, with reference to mobile technologies, a non-cognitive and object-oriented consideration of the autonomous role of material technical objects in spatial understanding has been suggested (Ash 2013).

The claim for a ‘rematerialisation’ has been even advanced with regards to geographical information systems (GIS) and GIScience. Reacting to the ways in which, from a cultural, critical, or deconstructivist point of view, GIS are equated to mere powerful discursive entities, Leszczynski (2009a, 2009b) claimed that this critique abstracted GIS technology away from its material foundation in computing. Leszczynski proposed to include within a philosophical interrogation of the ontology of GIS (on the plural meanings of ontology in GIScience, see Agarwal 2004) also an ontic component, which here refers not to the essence of technology but to its material basis and concrete reification in technological objects. Through a critically realist philosophical lens, Leszczynski considered GIS primarily as physical computational entities, discrete technological devices, component architectures, and specific digital objects. She highlighted that promoting a notion of GIS as material entities does not reduce them into a set of neutral tools nor impede their understanding as a set of practices; rather, promoting the rematerialisation of GIS ‘emphasizes the material forms that these practices take’ (Leszczynski 2009a, p. 584).

Figure 1.1 Tracing a virtual path beyond the physical margin of a map. Vieste, 2018.

Source: Author’s photograph

Interest in the materiality and objecthood of cartography can also be found within what is considered the current most influential paradigm in cartographic theory, namely, post-representational cartography. Advanced in the second half of the 2000s by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins (2009), post-representational cartography implies a rethinking of maps from a practice-based perspective. Rather than being valued for exactness and cognitive efficiency, or otherwise read and deconstructed as powerful representations and visual discourses, maps should be viewed as mapping practices and events, which involve networks of human and non-human agents. In their influential Manifesto for Map Studies, Dodge, Kitchin and Perkins (2009, pp. 220–243) introduced a section entitled ‘Materiality of mapping’. The peculiar, renewed attention to cartographic materiality is expressed as follows:

In many other areas of the social sciences there has been a marked turn towards the materiality of objects in social processes, with a concern for the tactile experience of things. […] The materiality of mapping has been largely overlooked in cartographic scholarship, and in particular in contemporary research on digital products and the virtualization of interaction and experience online. In practice, paper maps are still used and many times digital maps are printed out for immediate, convenient use and annotation. Meanwhile, digital map interfaces need to be interacted with in very material ways (e.g. manipulating buttons with fingers, adjusting the position of screens, to make things more visible in imperfect lighting conditions and so on).

(Dodge, Kitchin and Perkins 2009, p. 229)

This concern for the objecthood of maps is clearly marked by a focus on their material consistency.

A widely known theoretical work on maps as non-human actors has been introduced by Latour, and it, at least partially, returns to a historical approach. In Science in Action, Latour addressed cartography as a ‘dramatic example’ (Latour 1987, p. 223) of the means invented during the modern age to make Western domination at a distance feasible. Those means, Latour argued, were characterised by mobility, stability, and combinability. Cartography took part in those long networks that generated what Latour defined ‘immutable and combinable mobiles’ (Latour 1987, p. 227). The status of immutability is given by the ways in which, during the modern age, cartographic information gradually became standardised, universalised, and fixable into the form of maps. The status of combinability is given by the possibility of combining, reshuffling, and superimposing at will different maps, no matter when and where they come from or what their original size is. The status of mobility is given by the portability and transferability of the cartographic artefact, which became a vehicle to transport Western spatial knowledge into different contexts, with the aim of exploring, trading, and colonising. The map, thus, is part of those objects that ‘at one point or another [will] take the shape of a flat surface of paper that can be archived, pinned on a wall and combined with others’ (Latour 1987, p. 227). Inscription is the way in which cartography ‘present[s] absent things’ or establishes a ‘two-way relation with objects’ in the real world (Latour 1986, p. 8), and it implies also a material consistency: Maps are two-dimensional, paper-made inscriptions. Among the advantages Latour listed for these inscriptions, namely, being mobile, i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: layers of map thinking
• 1 (Re)Turning to cartographic things
• 2 From object-oriented ontology (OOO) to map studies, and vice versa
• 3 Stretching theories: cartographic objects, map acts
• 4 To rest on cartographic surfaces
• 5 Learning from cartifacts, drifting through mapscapes
• 6 The productive failures of literary cartographic objects: the father, the son, The Road, and the broken map
• 7 The gentle politics of non-human narration: a Europe map’s autobiography
• 8 Pictured maps, object renderings, and close readings
• 9 Animated cartography, or entering in dialogue with maps
• 10 Maps vis-à-vis maps: (in-car) navigation, coexistence, and the digital others
• 11 Re-visitations at cartographic sites: the becomings and ‘unbecomings’ of maps
• Conclusions
• Index