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Article Excerpt
Introduction
Instead of mapping as a means of appropriation, we might begin to see it as a means of emancipation and enablement, liberating phenomena and potential from the encasements of convention and habit. What remains unseen and unrealized across seemingly exhausted grounds becomes actualized anew with the liberating efficacy of creatively aligned cartographic procedures. Mapping may thus retain its original entrepreneurial and exploratory character, actualizing within its virtual spaces new territories and prospects out of pervasive yet dormant conditions. [James Corner, The agency of mapping, p. 252.]
The look of maps is changing, again. Critical cartography, critical GIS and GPS, and artists and geographers engaged with geospatial technologies are responding to the flexibility of geospatial tools by redefining and expanding the form and function of maps and mapping (Crampton and Krygier 2005; Sheppard 2005; Abrams and Hall 2006; Perkins 2003; Perkins 2004). Mapmakers across academic disciplines and mapping professions are turning their attention to changing both the variety of map forms and mapping processes, empowered by the flexibility and accessibility of new digital technologies, a critical theoretical foundation, and an accumulated body of knowledge concerning nonwestern map traditions. The resulting critical practices empower individuals and communities (Bloch and Harrower 2006; Erle etal. 2005), resituate Western mapping techniques in the realm of performative and interventionist practices (Abrams and Hall 2006; kanarinka 2006; Corner 1999), and create new, nonrepresentational forms of mapping (Kwan 2007; Perkins 2004).
A recurring theme in these critical cartographies is the question of how to express the geographies of human experience and place in the map. The question of how to map place is not new to Western cartography; rather, it is one that is now renewed and energized by theory and technology. By place, I mean "lived space," that which is created by identity and intimate connection, as well as the creator of identity and intimate connection (Tuan 1977; Massey 1997; Casey 1993; Cresswell 2004). Place as space shaped by experience, including all that experience implies: "what a person has undergone or suffered," "the ability to learn from what one has undergone," and "the overcoming of perils" (Tuan 1977, p. 9). Is cartography capable of depicting spaces shaped by experience? Or are Western mapping practices antithetical to expression of place in some fundamental way such that place can only be expressed by turning away to other expressive forms, to the drawing, the photograph, or the painting? (1)
Western cartography is characterized by specific assumptions and structures, and those structures carry limitations. The Western map is an assemblage of ideas about representation and reality emphasizing an "all seeing" perspective, a fixed scale, and mathematical projection from sphere to developable surface. Culturally constructed and infused by the cartographers' interests, the Western map actively ignores its inherent point of view by presenting a "pointless" portrayal of space (Pickles 2004, pp. 75-91; Turnbull 2000, pp. 99-124; Wood 1992, p. 76), the "view from nowhere" (Nagel 1986). Through statistical and graphic generalization, the features of the map are categorized into the hierarchies of quantitative and qualitative data; division of features into points, lines, and areas; and assignment of categories to symbolization through size, arrangement, and texture (Crampton and Krygier 2005, p. 20). The visual aesthetic that results from those accumulated layers of homogenizing categories communicates a geography of modernity, universality, detachment, and placelessness. In other words, it is a visual language more commonly used not to portray place, but to erase it. (2)
For those mapmakers who do seek to portray geographies shaped by experience, one strategy is to reject Western cartographic convention and remake the map through other expressive forms that more directly capture the emotional qualities of attachment to place. Artists have long explored these alternative mappings, as in the Situationists' practice of drift or derive, the game-board mappings of Raoul Bunschoten (Corner 1999), and the interventionist mappings of psychogeographers today (kanarinka 2006). In geography, Keith Lilley traces the deep tradition of drawing and sketch mapping as a means to both explore and express place in cultural geography (Lilley 2000). The hand-drawn map has also served as the foundation for bioregional mapping projects, as for example the Common Ground Community Mapping Project (2006). Sketch mapping, derive, and game-board maps all reject Western cartographic conventions and replace them entirely with mapping that is personal and centered on the exploration of emotional meanings in the landscape.
In this article, I focus on Western cartographic language itself, the graphic variables and their visual grammar (Bertin 1983; MacEachren 1994), as the strategic site for uncovering expression of place. Cartographic language is not fixed; it has always remained open to revision in order to accommodate new technological capabilities (MacEachren 1995; Koch 2000) and shown to be theoretically capable of expressing multiple ontologies of space, despite the fact that those capabilities are rarely utilized (Hallisey 2005). It is an assemblage, just as Western cartographic tradition itself is an assemblage.
Despite the theorized flexibility and fluidity of its structure, geographers have only recently begun to imagine other mapping processes articulating alternative epistemologies (Pavlovskaya 2006; Kwan 2002). In my work, I seek to contribute to this re-imagination of the capabilities of Western geospatial technologies by expanding cartographic language for expression of place without leaving the realm of the digital map. As poststructuralist and nonrepresentational mapping practices increasingly inform new critical cartographies, a return to the structures and categories of visual variables and visual grammar may appear to some as antithetical to the spirit of critical cartography. Nevertheless, I see within these structures, as expressed previously by Corner, a liberating, creative, yet dormant mode of expression in need of imaginative expansion. As John Pickles concluded:
Our existing cartographies and categories are far less fettered than we have perhaps acknowledged. This is not to say that traditional and contemporary cartographies have always been, or are currently open to these new cartographies. It is to say that it may be possible to develop new cartographies and geographies only by changing the way we think about the cartographies we have (Pickles 2004, p. 194).
In this article, I first explore how other cartographers have confronted the need to express place directly through cartographic language. Next, I present the example of how the problem of place arose as a significant question during my project to map the historical geography of fur trade voyageurs in the eighteenth century. I demonstrate the way in which I chose to address this problem of place by focusing on narrative. I propose that narrative techniques, which have been useful for creating place in other forms of artistic expression, are also useful for creating narrative in the map. My intention is to demonstrate, through a few examples, the enormous potential of narrativity as a means to expand cartography's ability to articulate multiple geographies and spaces.
Mapping Experience
The question of whether cartographic language can expand to express a sense of place extends at least to the work of the cartographer and artist Eduard Imhof, when he questioned the difference between color conventions in the map and color as it is perceived in "day to day visual experience:"
The faces of nature are extremely variable, whether viewed from an aircraft or from the ground. They change with the seasons and the time of day, with the weather, the direction of views, and with the distance from which they are observed, etc. If the completely 'lifelike' map were produced, it would contain a class of ephemeral--even momentary--phenomena; it would have to account for seasonal variation, the time of day and those things that are influenced by changing weather conditions (Imhof 1982, pp. 296-97).
Imhof explored this problem of the cartographic representation of landscape color in his 1938 map, Karte der Gegend um den Walensee. In this study, Imhof experimented with elevation color symbols that were "not adapted from a colored aerial photograph,...
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