Rethinking Maps

New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory

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

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415461528
• eBook ISBN: 9781134043859
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Maps are changing. They have become important and fashionable once more. Rethinking Maps brings together leading researchers to explore how maps are being rethought, made and used, and what these changes mean for working cartographers, applied mapping research, and cartographic scholarship. It offers a contemporary assessment of the diverse forms that mapping now takes and, drawing upon a number of theoretic perspectives and disciplines, provides an insightful commentary on new ontological and epistemological thinking with respect to cartography.

This book presents a diverse set of approaches to a wide range of map forms and activities in what is presently a rapidly changing field. It employs a multi-disciplinary approach to important contemporary mapping practices, with chapters written by leading theorists who have an international reputation for innovative thinking. Much of the new research around mapping is emerging as critical dialogue between practice and theory and this book has chapters focused on intersections with play, race and cinema. Other chapters discuss cartographic representation, sustainable mapping and visual geographies. It also considers how alternative models of map creation and use such as open-source mappings and map mash-up are being creatively explored by programmers, artists and activists. There is also an examination of the work of various 'everyday mappers' in diverse social and cultural contexts.

This blend of conceptual chapters and theoretically directed case studies provides an excellent resource suited to a broad spectrum of researchers, advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in human geography, GIScience and cartography, visual anthropology, media studies, graphic design and computer graphics. Rethinking Maps is a necessary and significant text for all those studying or having an interest in cartography.

1 Thinking about maps

Rob Kitchin, Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge¹

Introduction

A map is, in its primary conception, a conventionalized picture of the Earth’s pattern as seen from above.

(Raisz 1938)

Every map is someone’s way of getting you to look at the world his or her way.

(Lucy Fellowes, Smithsonian curator, quoted in Henrikson 1994)

Given the long history of mapmaking and its scientific and scholarly traditions one might expect the study of cartography and mapping theory to be relatively moribund pursuits with long established and static ways of thinking about and creating maps. This, however, could not be further from the truth. As historians of cartography have amply demonstrated, cartographic theory and praxis have varied enormously across time and space, and especially in recent years. As conceptions and philosophies of space and scientific endeavour have shifted so has how people come to know and map the world.

Philosophical thought concerning the nature of maps is of importance because it dictates how we think about, produce and use maps; it shapes our assumptions about how we can know and measure the world, how maps work, their techniques, aesthetics, ethics, ideology, what they tell us about the world, the work they do in the world, and our capacity as humans to engage in mapping. Mapping is epistemological but also deeply ontological—it is both a way of thinking about the world, offering a framework for knowledge, and a set of assertions about the world itself. This philosophical distinction between the nature of the knowledge claims that mapping is able to make, and the status of the practice and artefact itself, is intellectually fundamental to any thinking about mapping.

In this opening chapter we explore the philosophical terrain of contemporary cartography, setting out some of the reasons as to why there is a diverse cdonstellation of map theories vying for attention and charting some significant ways in which maps have been recently theorized. It is certainly the case that maps are enjoying something of a renaissance in terms of their popularity, particularly given the various new means of production and distribution. New mapping technologies have gained the attention of industry, government and to some extent the general public keen to capitalize on the growing power, richness and flexibility of maps as organizational tools, modes of analysis and, above all, compelling visual images with rhetorical power. It is also the case that maps have become the centre of attention for a diverse range of scholars from across the humanities and social sciences interested in maps in and of themselves and how maps can ontologically and epistemologically inform other visual and representational modes of knowing and praxis. From a scientific perspective, a growing number of researchers in computer science and engineering are considering aspects of automation of design, algorithmic efficiency, visualization technology and human interaction in map production and consumption.

These initiatives have ensured that mapping theory over the past twenty years has enjoyed a productive period of philosophical and practical development and reflection. Rather than be exhaustive, our aim is to demonstrate the vitality of present thinking and practice, drawing widely from the literature and signposting relevant contributions among the chapters that follow. We start our discussion by first considering the dimensions across which philosophical differences are constituted. We then detail how maps have been theorized from within a representational approach, followed by an examination of the ontological and epistemological challenges of post-representational conceptions of mapping.

Dimensions across which map theory is constituted

A useful way of starting to understand how and why map theory varies is to explore some of the dimensions across which philosophical debate is made. Table 1.1 illustrates some important binary distinctions that strongly influence views on the epistemological and ontological status of mapping: judging a philosophy against these distinctions provides an often unspoken set of rules for knowing the world, or in our case, for arguing about the status of mapping. These distinctions are clearly related to each other. An emphasis upon the map as representation, for example, is also often strongly associated with the quest for general explanation, with a progressive search for order, with Cartesian distinctions between the map and the territory it claims to represent, with rationality, and indeed with the very act of setting up dualistic categories. By exploring how these dimensions work we can begin to rethink mapping and explain the complex variety of approaches described later in this book.

The mind–body distinction is often a fundamental influence on how people think about the world. If the mind is conceptualized as separate from the body then instrumental reason becomes possible: the map can be separated from the messy and subjective contingencies that flow from an embodied view of mapping. As such, science and reason become possible and a god-like view from nowhere can represent the world in an objective fashion, like a uniform topographic survey. On the other hand assuming a unity of mind and body and emphasizing the idea of embodied knowing focuses attention on different, more hybrid and subjective qualities of mapping, rendering problematic distinctions between the observer and observed.

Table 1.1 Rules for knowing the world: binary opposites around which ideas coalesce

The question of whether geographic knowledge is unique or whether the world might be subject to more general theorizing also has fundamental implications for mapping. An ideographic emphasis on uniqueness has frequently pervaded theorizing about mapping in the history of cartography: if each map were different, and described a unique place, searching for general principles that might govern design, or explain use would be doomed to fail. Instead, mapping becomes the ultimate expression of descriptive endeavour, an empirical technique for documenting difference. Artistic approaches to mapping that privilege the subjective may be strongly compatible with this kind of interpretation. On the other hand a more nomothetic approach, which emphasizes laws and denies idiosyncratic difference risks reifying artificially theorized models or generalizations while at the same time offering the possibility of scientific universalization. Many of the approaches described in the chapters by Goodchild and Gartner in this volume subscribe to this quest for order. Debate continues around the nature of map generalization and whether mapping is holistic or fragmentary, stochastic or regular, invariant or contingent, natural or cultural, objective or subjective, functional or symbolic, and so on. It is clear, however, that since World War II a number of different scientific orthodoxies have pervaded the world of Western academic cartographic research which almost all trade on the notion of searching for a common, universal approach. Yet, paradoxically, everyday ideas of geography and mapping as ideographic and empirical survive.

As we examine in detail later in the chapter, the idea of viewing maps as texts, discourses or practices emerged in the late 1980s, in stark opposition to the more practical and technologically driven search for generalization. These new theoretical ways of understanding mapping often emphasized the discursive power of the medium, stressing deconstruction, and the social and cultural work that cartography achieves. Here, the power of mapping becomes a more important consideration than the empirical search for verifiable generalization, and the chapters in this volume by Crampton, Harris and Hazen, and Propen consider some of these alternative approaches.

Structural explanations of the significance of mapping have also strongly influenced understandings of maps. Insights drawn might stem from class relations, from cultural practice, from psychoanalysis, or linguistics: for example, semiotic approaches to mapping have been a powerful and influential way of approaching the medium and its messages for academic researchers (see Krygier and Wood’s chapter). There is an ongoing debate in relation to mapping over how the agency of an individual might be reconciled with this kind of approach, given that structural approaches often posit fundamental and inevitable forces underpinning all maps. There is also a continuing debate over the philosophical basis of the structural critique. For example, is it grounded in a materialist view of the world, or in a more ideological reading of the human condition.

The distinction between forces producing the world and the forces consuming it also has a strong resonance in philosophical debates around mapping. The cultural turn in academic geography encouraged a growing emphasis on the contexts in which maps operate, encouraging a shift away from theorizing about production and towards philosophies of mapping grounded in consumption. Here, the map reader becomes as important as the mapmaker. Technological change that reduced the significance of barriers to accessing data, and the democratization of cartographic practice have also encouraged this changed emphasis. Associated with this shift has been the increasingly nuanced drift towards poststructuralist ways of knowing the world, which distrust all-encompassing knowledge claims. Instead of a belief in absolute space, or a socially constructed world, an alternative way of understanding mapping has emphasized relativity and contingency in a universe where notions of reality come to be replaced by simulation and in which the play of images replaces visual work, or in which speed of change itself gains agency.

Representational cartography

Maps as truth

It is usually accepted that cartography as a scientific endeavour and industry seeks to represent as faithfully as possible the spatial arrangements of phenomena on the surface of the earth. The science of cartography aims to accurately capture relevant features and their spatial relations and to represent a scaled abstraction of that through the medium of a map. Maps seek to be truth documents; they represent the world as it really is with a known degree of precision. Cartography as an academic and scientific pursuit then largely consists of theorizing how best to represent and communicate that truth (through new devices, e.g. choropleth maps, contour lines; through the use of colour; through ways that match how people may think, e.g. drawing on cognitive science).

This quest for producing truth documents has been the preoccupation for Western cartographers since the late Middle Ages, and especially with the need for accurate maps with respect to navigation, fighting wars and regulating property ownership. It was only in the 1950s, however, that the first sustained attempts began to emerge in the US to reposition and remould academic cartography as an entirely scientific pursuit. Up until then the history of cartography was a story of progress. Over time maps had become more and more precise, cartographic knowledge improved, and implicitly it was assumed that everything could be known and mapped within a Cartesian framework. The artefact and individual innovation were what mattered. Space, following Kant, became conceived as a container with an explicit geometry that was filled with people and things, and cartography sought to represent that geometry. Scientific principles of collecting and mapping data emerged, but cartography was often seen as much of an art as a science, the product of the individual skill and eye of the cartographer. Mapping science was practical and applied and numerous small advances built a discipline.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, US scholar Arthur Robinson and his collaborators sought to re-cast cartography, focusing in particular on systematically detailing map design principles with the map user in mind. His aim was to create a science of cartography that would produce what he termed ‘map effectiveness’ – that is, maps that capture and portray relevant information in a way that the map reader can analyse and interpret (cf. Robinson and Petchenik 1976). Robinson suggested that an instrumental approach to mapping grounded in experimental psychology might be the best way for cartography to gain intellectual respectability and develop a rigorously derived and empirically tested body of generalizations appropriate for growing the new subject scientifically. Robinson adopted a view of the mind as an information-processing device. Drawing upon Claude Shannon’s work in information theory, complexity of meaning was simplified into an approach focusing on input, transfer and output of information about the world. Social context was deemed to be irrelevant; the world existed independent of the observer and maps sought only to map the world. The cartographer was separate from the user and optimal maps could be produced to meet different needs.

The aims of the cartographer were normative—to reduce error in the representation and to increase map effectiveness through good 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 symbolize these data; how to combine these symbols together; and what kind of map to publish. Framed by an empiricist ideology, the research agenda of cartography then was to reduce signal distortion in the communication of data to users. Art and beauty had no place in this functional cartographic universe.

Out of this context in the late 1960s and 1970s emerged an increasingly sophisticated series of attempts to develop and position cartographic communication models as the dominant theoretical framework to direct academic research. Communication models encouraged researchers to look beyond a functional analysis of map design, exploring filters that might hinder the encoding and decoding of spatial information (Figure 1.1). For researchers such as Grant Head (1984) or Hansgeorg Schlichtmann (1979) the map artefact became the focus of study, with an emphasis on the semiotic power of the map as opposed to its functional capacity, while Christopher Board (1981) showed how the map could be conceived as a conceptual, as well as a functional, model of the world. As models of cartographic communication multiplied so attention also increasingly focused on the map reader, with cognitive research seeking to understand how maps worked, in the sense of how readers interpreted and employed the knowledge maps sought to convey. Drawing on behavioural geography, it was assumed that map reading depended in large part upon cognitive structures and processes and research sought to understand how people came to know the world around them and how they made choices and decisions based on that knowledge. This approach is exemplified in the work of Reginald Golledge (1999), Robert Lloyd (2005) and Cynthia Brewer (cf. Brewer et al. 1997). Here the map user is conceived as an apolitical recipient of knowledge and the cartographer as a technician striving to deliver spatially precise, value-free representations that were the product of carefully controlled laboratory-based experiments that gradually and incrementally improved cartographic knowledge and praxis. Most research investigated the filters in the centre of this system concerned with the cartographers’ design practice, and the initial stages of readers extracting information from the map (such work continues, e.g. Fabrikant et al. 2008). Little work addressed either what should be mapped or how mapping was employed socially because this was beyond the philosophical remit for valid research.

Other strands of scientific research into mapping emphasize...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Thinking about maps
• 2 Rethinking maps and identity: choropleths, clines, and biopolitics
• 3 Rethinking maps from a more-than-human perspective: nature–society, mapping and conservation territories
• 4 Web mapping 2.0
• 5 Modeling the earth: a short history
• 6 theirwork: the development of sustainable mapping
• 7 Cartographic representation and the construction of lived worlds: understanding cartographic practice as embodied knowledge
• 8 The 39 Steps and the mental map of classical cinema
• 9 The emotional life of maps and other visual geographies
• 10 Playing with maps
• 11 Ce n’est pas le monde (This is not the world)
• 12 Mapping modes, methods and moments: a manifesto for map studies