Cartography: mapping theory

Abstract

It is widely accepted that 'maps and cartography comprise a primary part of the geographer 's technology, methodology and language' (Bradshaw and Williams, 1999: 250). Yet 'marxists . . . humanists . . . [s]ocial theorists and some feminists seem to find maps peripheral and irrelevant, and postmodern geographers often find maps, with their categories and symbols, downright inimical to their core agendas' (Wheeler, 1998: 2). It has been argued that quantitative geography and cartography have been devalued within human geography following the cultural turn (Dorling, 1998) and that large numbers of geographers have become 'mapphobic' (Wheeler, 1998), leaving maprelated research to the burgeoning field of Geographic Information Science and visualization.Meanwhile it has become increasingly fashionable for researchers informed by concerns with critical social theory to use the 'm' word, but to have little appreciation of how maps work as tools. Thus the history of cartography has become an active field for literary and historical investigation, with researchers discovering another map to deconstruct, or exploring written texts for embodied spatial concerns (see Helgerson and Woolway-Grenfell, 1998, andCosgrove, 1998, for many examples of these approaches). Maps 'are once again in the thick of it' (Helgerson, 1998: 3) for critical social theorists, artists, literary critics and cultural geographers, but also in a very different way for planners, GIS researchers and scientists. Art and science offer different cartographic explanations (Krygier, 1995).There are profound differences between those who research mapping as a practical form of applied knowledge, and those who seek to critique the map and the mapping process. On the one hand, scientific research addressing new agendas of visualization and representation (e.g., Fairbairn et al., 2001; Slocum et al., 2001) uses empirical investigation to develop better understanding of the cognitive processes underpinning representation of spatial information. On the other hand, critical social theory seeks to problematize mapping and visualization as social practice (e.g., Harley, 2001), to dissect the relationships between mapping and the exercise of power, and increasingly to explore the complex and contingent performative potential of mapping (e.g., Cosgrove,

Rethinking maps

“…In so doing, cartography shifts from being ontical in status, wherein the ontological assumptions about how the world can be known and measured are implicitly secure, to an ontological project that questions more fully the work maps do in the world. This, for us, goes some way towards resolving Perkins' (2003) dilemma, providing a theoretical space in which to examine the technical and ideological aspects of cartography, and the full range of mapping practices including professional cartography, counter mappings, participatory mapping, and performative mappings -all are necessarily selective, contingent and contextual mappings to solve relational, spatial problems.…”

Theorizing maps with literature

“…Today's critical cartography has been relocated from different internal and external points of view. Crampton and Krygier (2006) historicize and revitalize it in the light of the new geospatial technologies; Hanna and Del Casino (2003) highlight the limitations of the deconstructive reading of tourism cartography; Perkins (2003) manifests the frustration deriving from a binary opposition of technical and ideological approaches to mapping; Kitchin and Dodge (2007: 332) address counter-mapping (or the use of maps as counterpower means) as a strategy that fails to challenge the 'ontological status' of the map.…”

The cartographic calculation of space: race mapping and the Balkans at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919

“…Maps have been analysed as semiotic devices (Wood and Fels 1986), as rational images that code the world for interpretation (Pickles 2004), as part of a field of psychogeographies in which we live (Pinder 2003), and as power-knowledge (Harley 1988a(Harley , 1988b(Harley , 1989, see also Harley 2001). For recent reviews see Perkins (2003Perkins ( , 2004.…”