The Aura of Cartography

The last few posts have been setting the groundwork for what I really wanted to be approaching: the aura of cartography (should be said in a hushed whisper).

A number of writers have talked about the "power of maps" over the last few decades. J.B. Harley was the first to address it, Denis Wood wrote a book about it, and now Vincent Virga has written a breathless book about it (note: I have not read the book yet, only heard the interview).

But, as will become apparent after talking a while with cartographers, we are often a little baffled by all the "power" talk. If we, cartographers, have all this power, where are the dancing girls? Where are the yachts? Heck, where are the offices with windows?

But, of course, there is something there. There is an aura of authority that has hung over published, cartographic maps for a long time. It's the authority of an encyclopedia or a dictionary, not of a uniform or an altar. The fact that it has been harnessed to temporal power doesn't mean it posesses that power inherently.

Specifically, it is an interactive authority: the cartographer does not, in principle, parcel out information only to the favored few. He/she/they publish it far and wide. And the users, when they interpret the map, are themselves holders of additional information about a territory, more than they have by simply standing within it.

And this is where I go back two essays, to the business about the author/user divide. To the extent that map users get a "rush" out of seeing the world laid out on paper beneath them (and yes, I get that rush too--I suspect all us map-lovers do), we assume it somehow reflects the intent of the map maker, and indeed some think it reflects the abilities of the map maker.

And it doesn't. Because the construction of the illusions of completeness, of continuity, of accuracy, are all projected onto the finite (considerable, but finite) work of a craftsperson, a geo-librarian, an editor. And interestingly, this is true of people in the "artsy" arts as well. Over Thanksgiving, I was listening to an excellent interview with guitarist Leo Kottke on Minnesota Public Radio. Kottke is very much an "inspiration-driven" artist; he really believes in his musical ideas coming from somewhere outside him. But the act of getting them into his repertoire is absolutely a butt-in-the-chair, hard-working attitude.

Map-makers tend not to be especially inspiration-driven. I mean, we are inspired by and driven by our love of place and geographic space, but we don't suddenly reach in to the air for motifs and riffs and turns of phrase: our modes of expression are fundamentally conscious. And that conscious working of shape and form creates the framework which allows the users to experience what they experience. It's a little like designing a roller-coaster.

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I talk about all this like it's a static cultural phenomenon: maps work like this, the culture works like that. But really I think this aura of cartography is one of the casualties of the changes underway in the geo-world. Just as literacy changed they way we view people who write and desktop publishing took graphic design off its pedestal, the cultural context of cartography is getting a more rational footing. People still think it's cool if you make maps for work, but less an less do you get the baffled "but how do you make them?" sorts of questions. It's more like being a librarian, in that the systems you create and use are pretty transparent... and after all, that's the goal.