deliberate map(ping) the role of citizen cartography
democracy neo-cartography engagement grassroots access
politics | participation 2.0 by natalia skoczylas
Maps are necessarily incomplete. If they were ideal graphic depictions of reality with accuracy and objectivity, they would be redundant and unnecessary. A map always suggests a certain perspective, a specific angle; it is the narrative element that shapes it into a graphic point of view. The 1855 James Gall’s orthographic map illustrated how powerful a perspective can be. Given that distortion is an inevitable part of the discourse of map-making, Gall used new mathematical formulae for what a representation of the world, based on the actual area of the continents, rather than their importance to the Northern hemisphere. This was picked up by Arno Peters in 1973 as a political alternative to Mercator projection which made the northern hemisphere larger than the south. Diverse perspectives, opinions, identities and elements form temporal narratives that describe what we believe is the world, and that becomes the map.
Mapping has become a complex and difficult field in the dusk of whatever once was democratic society, and within modern political frameworks. 1 Increasing discontent with given tools of participation and decision-making, and a growing awareness of the inability of developed practices to establish authentic representation, society is pushed to search for more effective methods. The delusion of participation and equal access allows those in power to reinforce their own interests; the interest of the commons is to change these dynamics. Mapping is one of the possible ways of dealing with the problem of misrepresentation and muteness.
1 For example, Literary Geographies is a platform for researchers who combine humanistic knowledge with cartography and geography: ‘Geography, Literature, and the African Territory: some observations on the Western map’ or ‘Representation of Territory in the South African Literary Imagination’ or ‘Mapping Knowledge and Power: cartographic representations of empire in Victorian Britain’. Keywords for such topics are extremely wide: creation, interdisciplinary, graphic rhetoric, power, intertextuality, strategies of mapping, critical cartography, narrative, politics of space, identity, ideology, measure, scale, text, place, space, production of space and users – just to mention a few. See literarygeographies. wordpress.com and www. literarygeographies.net 2 Mark Graham, ‘Neogeography and the Palimpsest of Place: Web 2.0 and the Construction of a Virtual Earth’, www.geospace. co.uk/files/Neogeography.pdf Reverend James Gall’s Orthographic projection from ‘Use of Cylindrical Projections for Geographical, Astronomical, and Scientific Purposes’ The Scottish Geographical Magazine , volume 1, 1885 Arno Peters projection, based on Gall’s original orthographic projection. The area of each land mass is mathematically correct.
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