Art Is a Tool: Maps as Pictures1

Denis Woods The Power of Maps2 came as a shock to the body cartographic. I
remember being in a lecture hall in 1992, and hearing hisses from around the room as the
book was mentioned.
Woods book and J.B. Harleys work before him ignited a flurry of map criticism, almost
all of it working from the idea of maps as statements, symbol systems, arguments, texts
but not pictures. As I discuss below, this is not entirely the map worlds fault, as the artworld
has made its own limited view of picturing the intellectual standard since the Enlightenment.
I was a studio art major in college, and I have always approached maps as primarily
visual, as pictures. It has always frustrated me as a mapmaker coming from an arts
background that the medium is so resistant to expression. I hope this paper will serve as an
opening for a larger discussion, and more importantly, will provide a framework for
experiments where we try to bridge the gap between art and maps, from both ends.
INTRODUCTION
Maps are pictures. Denis Wood et al. argue in the new edition of Looking Through
Maps that maps are not pictures, but arguments.3 This seems to me a peculiar distinction.
As I discuss below, all sorts of pictures are arguments. Maps are pictures, representations
of the earth and our constructions upon it. As Barry Smith suggests in his essay True Grid,
modern maps and scientific perspective share a close history (both appeared in early 15th
century Italy) and a similar theoretical basis in the idea of projection through an arbitrary,
even grid. Ptolemy lay the imaginary grid of latitude and longitude over the earths sphere
and then projected that grid onto a drawing surface. Alberti theorized perspective as a grid
placed before the painters field of vision, the painter then transferring what he or she sees
onto a gridded drawing surface.4 Geographers do not lay actual strings along the meridians
and parallels, and there is no evidence the old masters ever actually used actual physical
grids, but the idea of making measurement consistent and orienting it to an external source
can be seen in traditional surveyors tools and in such artistic devices as the camera
obscura.5
Maps tend to be highly abstracted pictures, like diagrams such as assembly instructions,
electrical diagrams, or chemical models. But maps are intended to represent and make clear
specific instances of the physical world, not theoretical or generic models. Thus a road-line
represents an actual road, not the generic idea of a road. Maps help bring abstract ideas
such as nation into the real physical world; the process is similar to the way picturing
religious figures can help persuade viewers of their reality and individuality.
1

This paper was made possible by sabbatical time provided by my employer, Hedberg Maps, Inc, for
whose support I am deeply grateful. An earlier, quite different paper was separately reviewed by Denis
Wood, Dan Strebe and TImothy Mennel, whose helpful criticism spurred this total rewrite. Special thanks
to my wife, Ingrid Case, for a thorough edit and for her support in finishing the paper.
2
Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York: Guilford, 1991).
3
Denis Wood, Ward Kaiser, and Bob Abrams, Seeing Through Maps: Many Ways to See the World
(Amherst, MA: ODT, 2006). My comments and quotes are based on a pre-publication proof provided by
Denis Wood.
4
Barry Smith, True Grid, referenced from an electronic copy on Barry Smiths web site,
ontology.buffalo.edu/smith; printed copy in Daniel Montello (ed.), Spatial Information Theory.
Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Proceedings of COSIT 2001, Morro Bay, California,
September 2001 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2205), (Berlin/New York: Springer, 14-27)
5
see David Hockneys controversial discovery of the camera obscura as described in Lawrence
Weschler, The Looking Glass, The New Yorker, January 31, 2000. Hockney later published a book on
the subject, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York: Viking
Studio, 2001).

Most art is pictures. Art is a fuzzy term at best these days. The fine arts were
formulated a little over 200 years ago (as Larry Shiner argues convincingly in The Invention
of Art), to distinguish creations suitable for aesthetic contemplation from those made for the
use and amusement of the hoi-polloi. Since then, the artworld has had to shed any number
of ideologies about itself. The ideology of perfect representation left the canon of art with
the advent of photography, replaced by the ideology of the creative mark. The ideology of
the precious object has been challenged any number of times, but the artists and
movements posing those challenges in turn have been absorbed into the artworld and art
market, giving some parts of that world the peculiar flavor of a souvenir shophow much
would Duchamps urinal be worth on the open market today? The ideology of craft as
separate from art became fuzzier with the acceptance into the artworld first of European high
decorative arts, then primitive art. As fine crafts have entered the artworld fully over the
last few deacades, that distinction has effectively disappeared.6
But most art remains grounded within a context of images, of projections from the real
world or an imagined world through whatever lens the artist is using into the space of the
artwork. Art is mostly conceived of as object, as physical instance. Even in cases of
performance art, the physicality of the performance is an essential element. The act of
framing somethinganythingas art is a declaration that this physical entity is worthy of
attention.
Art is not supposed to be a tool. Arthur Danto argues in The End of Art that as art
has become a discussion about art itself, it has become a branch of aestheticsa
philosophical field, not one bent on creating.7 Yet artists go on making pictures.
Shiner points to the establishment of the fine arts in the second half of the eighteenth
century as a turning point from which art ideologically shed practical function. Much of the
painted and sculpted artwork prior to that time was devoted to the church and the nobility.
As the divine right of kings and the churchs hold on intellectual life faded, a new theoretical
framework was needed to allow the maintenance of old beautiful things and support the
creation of new ones. Museums were created, and pictures that had functioned as supports
for church and state were isolated on gallery walls. Similar processes put music into concert
halls and reading into literary salons. Thus the arts were separated from crafts, and
usefulness, at least for a while, became the domain of crafts and trades. The historical code
of non-usefulness is still a part of what defines art. It can be a great relief to look at and
possess objects whose sole purpose is for us to contemplate them, objects that do not
demand that we operate them to some other end.
But this contemplation requires a curious sort of timing out, as if time spent with art
doesnt count. Most works of art are self-contained. They ask us to cease our own actions
and in some sense become part of the life projected in the artwork. Even when artworks
explicitly demand action, the fact that they are framed as art means they themselves are not
supposed to be part of our lives in the way that non-art political calls to action are.
On the other hand, my favorite definition of art is Duane Prebles offhanded comment that
aesthetic is the opposite of anaesthetic.8 To me, the best art is that which wakes you up,
surprising you with meaning seen out of the corner of your eyeTell all truth but speak it
slant/Success in circuit lies, as Emily Dickinson says.9
Art has a peculiar relationship, then, with the rest of the world. It divorces itself from our
everyday action, but hopes to wake us to deeper qualities within the everyday. It isnt
Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)
Arthur Danto, The End of Art, in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia,
1986)
8
Duane Preble with Sarah Preble, Artforms (New York: Harper & Row,1978), 17
9
Emily Dickinson, poem 1129, as printed in Final Harvest: Emily Dickinsons Poems (Boston: Little Brown,
1961) , 248
6
7

supposed to be useful, and its theory has drawn further and further from directly picturing the
world, but it continues to frame and discuss that world.
Maps are tools. The idea of maps as detached, objective documents is pretty well
discredited. In its place is a craft-like sensibility: a good map is a useful map.10 Maps are first
and foremost tools, an action-based quality quite different from conventional ideas of
aesthetic. We may appreciate the aesthetic lines of a steam locomotive, but its primary
role was to pull trains. We may long for the days of hand-made square nails and their premass-manufacturing worldI was delighted to find some in rehabbing my housebut their
primary purpose was to hold wood pieces together, and modern wire nails are stronger
and far cheaper to manufacture.11
Maps prevent you from getting lost. They tell you how to get somewhere else. They
tell you where other things are, what territories they occupy, how they relate to each other.
Maps are tools to help us understand, navigate and manipulate the real world. They may
be all sorts of other thingsargument, decoration, record, or illustration to name a fewbut if
a map cannot be used to navigate or interpret the world, it is not a good map.
Art is a Tool. Why do we seek out art? More to the point, why does each of us seek
out our own favored genres of art? Art built overtly to fill a particular need tends to be
predictable and thematically flat: see stereotypical new age music, romance novels, and
wildlife painting. And yet, these genres draw huge audiences. To a critical eye, the behavior
of audiences toward generic arts is like a drug, but who am I to throw stones when I
sometimes really need a dose of Van Eyck or American Beauty or Ursula LeGuin?
In Hinduism, deities are understood to be present in their sculptural or painted
incarnations. When devotees make offerings are made to these objects, they offer them to
the divine which is not just present in the object, but which (at least during the ceremonial
moment) are the object.12 Although teachings in the Judeo-Christian traditions generally
frown on idol worship, similar qualities can be seen in icons, altarpieces, and even simple
crucifixes or images of Mary. People seek out and use these images as they attempt to
get close to God.
Larry Shiner talks about the fine arts as a concept built around the idea of contemplation.
In effect, secularized fine art took over from religion among much of the educated elite as a
vehicle for reflection. Before the fine art divide, most works were made for specific
purposes: altarpieces and choral masses to enhance and focus the religious experience,
and royal portraits and fanfares as trappings of secular power. Under the fine-arts umbrella,
love, beauty, passion and sublimity became the subjects of reflective thought, often
couched in religious language, but freed of the requirement that they be applied as a tool of
religious orthodoxy or worldly power.13
I live in a post-fine-arts world. I was raised outside of churches. I seek out art because it
wakes me up, reminds me who I am and whats important. In the broadest sense the things
I find aesthetic are tools: they were made in order to make viewers understanding clearer
and brighter, and I seek them out in order that it will reach into me and pull me inside out,
shake me up and down, and leave me in a new place where I can see a little further, a little
more clearly.
10

At a session of the 2005 North American Cartographic Information Society, a panel of cartographers
uniformly stated that usefulness was the primary value they considered when formulating a map and its
design.
11
This view is based in large part on a reading of John Kouwenhovens work, especially his Made in
America (New York: Doubleday, 1949) and The Beer Can By the Side of the Road (New York: Doubleday,
1961)
12
Thanks to my mother Margaret Case for this insight, based on her introduction to the forthcoming The
Inner Journey: Views From the Hindu Tradition (Sand Point, ID: Morning Light Press, 2006)
13
Larry Shiner, op cit.`

Can art be a map? Both art and maps share in a larger conceptual space of pictures.
But the fine arts as we understand them resist explicit functionality, and maps practically
demand it. There has been an explosion of map-art in the last decade. But as a whole,
these art maps are more satisfying as artistic creations than as mappy tools.
The fine arts model is usually a closed construct: what happens in the book stays in the
book. The viewer need do nothing to make the artwork function beyond witnessing. On the
other hand, maps and other practical picturesassembly diagrams, game boards, or fieldguide illustrationsare meaningless unless the viewer acts them out in the real world or a
parallel imaginary world.
Thus when an art-oriented creator makes a map, he or she expects it to function in itself.
More importantly, the audience expects to receive it that way. Imagine visitors to a gallery
space being handed a printed map to the space outside the gallery as part of a
performative artwork. Does the wider world simply become a stage for a self-contained
artwork, rather than the artwork becoming an ongoing tool for understanding the wider world
itself? It is only when artists cease to behave like artists in the art world, do not present
themselves as artists, and do not act within the constructs of the artworld that audiences
expect to act a certain way, that an artists map will be truly accessible as a map within the
wider world.
Can maps be art? The rest of the paper explores several ways in which the
conventions and ontology of maps constrain expressive, tell it slant modes of
communication, and suggests paths for map-makers to consider in dealing with these
constraints.
In discussing whether an artwork can be a map or a map can be art, the underlying
ontologies of map and art are key. As long we see art and maps as classes of objects,
rather than aspects of which an object may possess more or less, they will be more like
jealously guarded territories, and less like traversable landscapes. And as long as we hold
to these territories as generally conceived, we will find ourselves unable to properly
explore territories of picturing between and outside them.
ARGUMENT
Maps are more than arguments. Wood, Kaiser and Abrams argue in their second
edition of Seeing Through Maps that maps are not pictures, but are rather propositions;
they are actually a way of speaking, rather than a way of seeing.14
I believe this marks the culmination of a line of argument that has dominated (one could
even argue created) map criticism over the last fifteen years. The primary thrust of this
deconstructionist school of criticism has been to uncover agendas and meanings within
maps that had previously held the position of seldom-questioned, objective documents of
fact. The essential thrust of this criticism has been broadly accepted, but with this acceptance
has come the basic critical understanding of maps as primarily rhetorical documents, which I
believe is problematic.
If we regard maps, arguments, and pictures as exclusive categories of things, this view
makes sense, but clearly this is not the case for most things, including maps. Maps are
rhetorical statements, and representations of the actual world, and exercises in imagination,
and records to extend and supplement memory. These are all non-exclusive
qualitiesmaps may possess greater or lesser degrees of any or all of them.
Mark Denils 2003 essay Cartographic Design: Rhetoric and Persuasion formulates a
framework for building maps on a rhetorical model, proposing three registers, or

14

Wood, Kaiser and Abrams, op cit. See note 1.

viewpoints from which to look at maps: cognitive, semiotic and artistic.15 Its a solid
formulation, but I fault it in two regards. First, all aspects of maps are considered in service to
the maps rhetorical thrust. Secondly, the artistic register is considered apologetically, as
Denil finds it necessary to argue against a half-century or more of awkwardly constructed
theory written from a non-art point of view.
Denil makes what at first seems like a fruitful exploration of ways in which art can be
considered useful, using as his primary text William Carlos Williams dialectic essay The
Basis of Faith in Art, which proposes that just as both good function and aesthetic form are
essential in good architecture, they are necessry in arts like poetry. Denil argues the same is
true for maps, which is a good start. But I would argue that by returning to rhetoric as the end
function of maps, Denil ultimately does this artistic register a disservice. Function is of course
essential to good mapping, but aesthetic content is important in itself, not just as a servant
to the overt message of the map.
Arguing is only part of a maps job. Mark Monmoniers How to Lie With Maps is a
succinct guide to the ways maps overtly argue, and how they can make dishonest points
using graphically dishonest techniques.16
Maps, however, are layered, and different layers can perform different roles, like the
elements of a theatrical performance. Some parts are stage set, and some are performers.
The stage set is essential to frame the argument, but the players make the actual argument.
It may be to an advertisers advantage to color states one way and not another, but the
argument is the color, not the shape. The advertiser is not arguing that Texas is Texasshaped.
Part of a maps job is to provide a platform for the audiences experiments.
Commonly accepted information either acts as stage setting for an argument, or is itself the
primary purpose of the map. Such maps create a platform for user experiments in the
maps virtual space.
Two examples: a map shows a proposed highway alignment. Thats the argument. Its
drawn on top of base mapping, which allows us to experiment with the ideas of the road
going here or there, of this effect or that possible cost over-run.
A bicycle map shows recommended routes, but also incorporates a general street
map. That lets a rider experiment with riding away from recommended routes, and lets nonbicyclists use the map to understand the layout of the town, as any street map would.
Arguments are an important aspect of maps, and map thinking had largely ignored that
aspect before Harley and Wood. My suggestion, though, is to reconsider the place of
argument. While it may be considered a central part of map construction, so can several
other aspects of map making. The lesson we can take from arc of the quantitative revolution
of the mid-twentieth century is that for all the value we can gain from exploring obviously
central issues, we do no service to our field in making any of those issues totemic. My point
is not to discredit the rhetoricians angle on mapmaking, but to suggest its place is alongside
other approaches.
POINT OF VIEW
An artwork has a point of view. Art has authors. It is not simply mechanical, even
when it follows Andy Warhols Factory-produced example. If nothing else, this makes the
object-based art market possible.
Mark Denil, Cartographic Design: Rhetoric and Persuasion, Cartographic Perspectives 45 (Spring
2003): 8-67
16
Mark Monmonier, How To Lie With Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)
15

Less cynically, authorship creates a place for individualized creation. Marks made by a
person are valuable in a highly automated world, where more and more material goods are
commodities. If we think of art not as a market segment but as a quality more or less
present in made things, it provides a theoretical counterpoint to efficient manufacture and
distribution, with which the map world seems as a whole to be more concerned.
An artwork may have many different points of view. There are whole schools of
linguistics and philosophy that are devoted to discussing point of view, vision, vantage, etc.
Some of these form the philosophical basis for the deconstructionist school of map criticism.
I claim no expertise in these schools, but will discuss three types of point of view I feel are
relevant to discussing maps and art.
The first point of view is relevant mainly when we view an artists allegedly accurate
rendition of the world. It is the operational point of view, the literal answer to the question,
whose point of view was that? As with an umpires call or a witness at trial, it asks us to
focus on the limits of any one persons physical vision. It is also what we pay attention to
when constructing or viewing scientific perspective or mathematical projection: what is being
viewed from where?
Authorial point of view asks a similar question regarding agenda, bias, affiliation and
mood. When we ask about point of view in a work of journalism or a rhetorical argument, we
acknowledge that everyone looks at the worlds abstract structures differently. It is this sort of
point of view that forms such as documentary film, journalism, and maps wrestle with in
considering the idea of objectivity.
Finally, there is a constructed personal point of view in many artworks, an acknowledged
artifice that allows the artist to create fictional spaces and people. This is point of view as
discussed in high school English classes: who is saying what, and do we see it externally or
through the eyes of a character? It is point of view as voice.
Repeatable experiments do not have an operational point of view. Consider
recipes, assembly diagrams, or Arthur Murrays instructions how to foxtrot. Any of these
may contain framing material that embeds it in a authorial point of view (think of Julia Childs
voice). But the recipes and diagrams themselves are free of specific viewpoint and open to
anyone, anywhere. They are presented as repeatable experiments. Unlike an artwork
which proposes a specific operational viewpoint (I sweated as I nervously spun the
dials.), these are essentially anonymous forms (turn dial A counterclockwise 180 to align
with dial B). It is as if the creator provides this material with a blank line and your name
here where the point of view is normally situated.
Most maps are not supposed to have a point of view. Maps with a planar
projection do not have a single operational point of view. Instead, the visual sense of maps
is grounded in repeatable experiment. The answer to the question whose view is it? is
supposed to be anyoneyou, for example. This argument breaks down intentionally
and repeatedly in a variety of maps: advertisers using maps to specifically locate
themselves, highway departments advocating for proposed road routes, Hitler proposing
a Greater Germany.
But there is a repeatable element to maps. The land does in fact end there, more or
less, and anyone who wishes to argue with this can repeat the experiment and go jump in a
lake. Even abstract concepts like national teritory have a great deal of reality (not to mention
firepower) on the ground.
Can maps have a point of view and still be maps? It depends on the sort of point
of view you mean. Maps with a specific operational point of view are not maps; they are

views.17 Maps with an authorial point of view are commonplace, but in order to retain
legitimacy, the map must be clear on where the author is relying on accepted fact, and
where he or she is expressing a specific authorial point of view.
Point of view as internal character or voice seems at first to be irrelevant to mappings
repeatable experiment. If a map is a picture which could only be drawn from one characters
perspective, then no reader can use it as a guide to that place. Instead, it will become a
guide to that characters experience of the place.
And yet, the marketplace shows that voice can co-exist easily with descriptions of
repeatable experiments, so long as the voice is sympathetic to the viewer. Travel guides
sell well if they are opinionated; they may merge into travel essays and local literature of
place, which are at their most fascinating when the narrating character is a cranky Bill Bryson
or Paul Theroux. Similarly, recipes framed in descriptions by authors of their experiences
cooking, or for example by Laurie Colwin in full-blown memoir, are enormously successful.
How can we bring more of that voice into mapping? The most obvious way is through
text, and interactive tagged maps based on this idea have in fact proliferated. But when the
map beyond the tags offers a neutral voice, the net effect is less convincing than it should
be. Besides, maps dominated by blocks of text, while they may be interesting, lose much
of their appeal as graphic communications.18
I think the map that really offers a convincing voice has yet to appear in the Western
map world. It will take chutzpah to make a map that says in its visual and textual entirety,
here is what I think and feel about this place. Perhaps we should look for the breakthrough
not in serious maps but in humor, where transgression is more easily justified. Already in
political cartoons maps are a clear tool for an unequivocally opinionated authorial voice.
We should also look at non-Western place-picturing traditions. David Turnbulls
exposition of Australian Aboriginal place-drawings (and other non-Western maps) shows
a way of visually portraying space as story, myth, and metaphor.19 Its hard to imagine
integrating this effectively into Western ideas of mapmaking, but its a worthy challenge.
SCALE
We experience the real world at a scale of 1:1. Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis
Borges made absurd satires on the idea of a 1:1 map that covered the landscape. But this
is in fact the scale at which we live our lives. And maps are always of a smaller scale than
1:1, reducing the earth so that sections of geographic space can be taken in at a single
glance.
As our portrayals get further from 1:1, they become less related to our direct
experience. We can expect to directly manipulate the objects portrayed on assembly
diagram, which are generally drawn at a scale between 10:1 and 1:100). The largest-scale
mapsbuilding site plans at 1:100 or 1:200 for examplemight show details like the size
of a window one might look through, the width of a sidewalk one might have to shovel, the
size of individual trees one might climb. On the largest-scale topographic maps, say
1:2500 survey maps, we can see individual houses which one might visit, actual street
width that would affect how one would drive them, the shapes of fields that bear directly on
how a farmer might plow them. As we progress through scales, less and less of what we
see is directly related to our moment-to-moment experience and action. Somewhere
between 1:100,000 and 1:250,000 evidence of that direct experience disappears
17

unless the point of view is so distant from the earths surface as to make it appear vertical at most points,
as with an orthogonal or globe view projection
18
See The Cultural Map of Wisconsin, an otherwise admirable publication, or the National Geographic
Societys Closeup:USA series of maps form the 1970s.
19
David Turnbull, Maps are Territories: Science is an Atlas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)

altogether.
Understanding small-scale mapsof states, regions, or the entire Earthdepends on a
prior understanding of small-scale geographic concepts like nation and route. We
understand these through memory and analogy based upon our direct experience. Maps
can act as a connective tissue to join smaller memories of space. The first time I was on my
own in London I used the old hand-lettered Bartholomews map of the city. By tracing my
routes of the day, surprising myself at how close I had come without realizing it to earlier
routes, I was using the map to tie together memories. Similarly, if I see a small-scale map of
the UK, I can collect my memories of separate places, including London, and see how
those memories physically relate to one another.
But to understand the idea of the United Kingdom as it relates to a political map of
Europe, I must understand how it is a territory analogous to an individual property, perhaps
using a scalar string of analogies: as an individual property is part of a municipality, so that
municipality is part of a county, and so forth. To use the map in considering parts of the
country outside my direct experience, I need to be able to say, for example, this line is a
motorway, and I know what a motorway is from example, so I know all these motorways
are analogous to those of my experience. And so forth.
But these analogous and collected-memory relations are not portrayals of the space of
our direct experience. When I point to the dot for London on a small-scale map, and say I
was there, I have no visual reminders of the details of place, of walked routes, of landmarks
or details seen, etc. Instead my remembered experience of place and all my second-hand
knowledge related to the area ar represented by one labeled symbol.
The things we subjectively react to in such a portrayal change as the scale
changes. When we see a map of the United States, we are seeing an space so vast it is
almost impossible to comprehend as a whole. We know it is a single territory, but few
Americans have experienced enough of it deeply enough to really understand it.
Literature is the main medium through which people have tried to explain the United
States. My favorite examples from the last century are John Steinbeck, William Least Heat
Moon, and Bill Bryson. In each of their narratives, the sense of America as a place is largely
achieved through a series of discrete anecdotal stories set in discrete places. These are
strung together by descriptions of the direct experience of repetitious travel: Steinbecks
new interstate system, Least Heat Moons blue highways, Brysons slog along the
Appalachian Trail. Both of these are then set against journalistic passages concerning
history, statistics and regional geography. It is the accumulations of anecdotal memory and
the way the author (and the reader) can generalize from them, that allows us to create a
national or regional picture.20
When we are simply shown the vision of the whole region, as in a conventional map of
the United States, the portrayal includes nothing to relate it to place. The closest thing to the
anecdote might be little scenes on an illustrated map. This is similar to the historic practice of
illustrated cartouches. Pictures of exotic people, flora and fauna, or of ships and sea
serpents, allow the viewer imagine anecdotal scenes that anchor an otherwise abstract
geography.
A modern small-scale map allows us to see the geographic idea of the nation: its creation
and expansion, its breadth, its political basis as a union of states, and in a broad sense
things like transportation and river networks. We see large-area patterns and frameworks,
not the local, person-level workings of those patterns.
When artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg draw a map of the United
States, their drawings are working from these abstract ideas. They represent not what they
see in America, but what they think abotu it. In a way these artworks have more in common
John Steinbeck,Travels With Charley; In Search of America, New York: Viking, 1962; William Least Heat
Moon, Blue Highways, Boston: LIttle, Brown 1982; Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering
America On the Appalachian Trail, New York: Broadway Books, 1999.
20

with cosmographs, like medieval mappaemundi or Buddhist mandalas, than with large-scale
topographic maps.
A sense of place can only be related through a large-scale map. J.B. Harleys
essay The Map as Biography describes Harleys favorite map, an Ordnance Survey
sheet covering Newton Abbot in Dorset at six inches to the mile, or 1:10,560. It is a place
with deep resonance for Harley, who lived there in the fifteen years he taught at the
University of Exeter. His essay begins by describing how the map reveals layers of
historical change in Newton Abbot as it went from a rural market town to a railroad center to a
small city with industry. Each stage made its mark on the land in the shape of the roads,
property lines, residential patterns, etc. He then discusses the map as evidence of
countless man-hours involved in the maps preparation. One can imagine, he says, the
peculiar invasion of the land by surveyors and map-makers, anonymous to us, for whom
the fieldwork, compilation and drawing of this series of maps formed a lifes work. Finally, he
talks about how the map calls up moments from his own life: how he and his son played in
this field, and how his son and wife are buried in that cemetery.21 It is, as David Woodwards
obituary of Harley says, a quintessentially poetic interpretation of personal meanings in
maps that transcend their cold technicality.22
This essay could not have been written using a significantly smaller-scale map. When I
show my three-year-old son a globe and show him where we live, Nothing in the picture
relates to our experiences of local geograohyfor this I pull out a local map. I can show
distances traveled when we visit grandparents, and talk about long airplane trips, but here
again, the experience of that distance is largely of the inside of an airplane cabin, and so the
only visual aid that would directly reflect that experience would be a photo or picture of the
inside of an airplane, or perhaps a seating diagram.
TAXONOMY
Taxonomy helps us make sense of unwieldy sets of things. The separating and
categorizing of things is a basic human instinct: think of the ancient practices of herding sheep
from goats and threshing wheat from chaff. Many of our map sorting processes are like
threshing: purification or distillation of desired sets items like towns or mountains out of
the otherwise undifferentiated landscape. To picture iconic objects instead of recording the
overall field of vision seems to be a basic human instinct: childrens drawings start with
mommy, daddy, and the house, and the oldest known pictures are of indivual game
animals.
In mapping, once we have threshed, we often further taxonomically divide a set. This
only comes up as that initial set of interesting items itself functionally becomes an unwieldy
mix of sheep and goatsboth valuable, but functionally different. A map of a town with five
buildings does not need to be graphically color-coded to distinguish houses from the post
office and bar; labels will suffice. On the other hand, in a town of 100 buildings, one might
want to distinguish the business district, and so make the visual focus easier.
Taxonomy helps make sense of an existing set, and it also makes possible the inclusion
of more layers of sorted data. If one can easily distinguish river lines from road lines, it
becomes less of an issue to include bike paths, railroads, countour ines, and so forth. And
by hierarchically classifying within a set of features (differentiating streets from highways for
example), one can create foreground/background relationships which further broaden the
amount of information that can be shown.
21

J.B. Harley, The Map as Biography: thoughts on Ordnance Survey Map, Six-inch Sheet Devonshire
CIX, SE, Newton Abbott, The Map Collector 41 (1987):18-20
22
David Woodward, Obituary: J. B. Harley (1932-1991), Imago Mundi 44 (1992):121

Taxonomy and expression can be an uneasy mix. As discussed earlier, the

artworld and the map world seem ideologically opposed. If expression is one of the basic
core values of the artworld, and taxonomy is one of the basic features of the map world, it is
not surprising they should also be fundamentally at odds. And much of the distrust between
these two spheres is well-founded.
Taxonomy in the service of expression is a source of biased reportage. This is
essentially what propaganda mapping is: the overlay of emotionally charged imagery or
ideas on an objective map base.
But no-one objects to a map of the ten best places to eat in the Chicago. This
taxonomization is presumed to be based on some sort of critical judgement or advertising
payment (it is nice when this is made clear), and so does not pretend to be a part of map
objectivity.
Where a traditional map runs into trouble is when authorial mark runs into fact. Imagine
someone painting a map of the world, and using a loose, flowing stroke to do so. By
ordinary rules of mapmaking, we can imagine new islands, fjords and mountain ranges being
created as the brush moves this way and that. Quickly the artwork ceases being a good
map. Even more egregious is when details like national boundaries are generalized for the
convenience of the artist. The map becomes worse than useless as a tool for transmitting
factual information, becoming at best a decorative object
Expression is blocked by taxonomys tendency to divide larger unities. A fully
developed portrait might discuss taxonomic categories its subject falls into, but it is the
ways the individual aligns with or contradicts such taxonomies that make a portrait interesting,
not the taxonomies themselves. The opening lines of a personals ad (SWM, NS, 31, likes
walks), is the ultimate taxonomic portrait. Like a map, it says a great deal in a small space,
and like a map it says very little about the actual experience of meeting the subject.
A tourist brochure for a city will often have an introductory section, summarizing the the
place. Full of cliches, this is nevertheless the closest thing we will get in the brochure to real
expression of sense of place.The remainder is made up of smaller entries for events and
points of interest, the sum of which ought to give us a better sense of the whole. But
because these points are each addressed as discrete entities, the whole never does come
together.
A topographic survey map of a place, such as Harleys map of Newton Abbot, is
entirely made of taxonomized elements: these lines mean walls, those mean houses; this
sort of type is the name of a village, that of an historic feature. Because Harley had
expereinced the place itself, he can link these signifiers himself, but the map does not
provide that unifying vision.
But taxonomic representation can be expressive. Simply the visual expression
of completeness, represented by a sampling across a spectrum, is deeply satisfying.
Much of the media world of young children is made up of such sets, whether they are
complete like an alphabet, or representative like an illustration of Noahs ark.
Although old-school map purists will disagree, I believe this is an essential part of maps
meaning as pictures, and a large part of their appeal (apart from their practical usefulness).
We may tell ourselves we hang a world map on the wall so we can find Belize when we
need to, but as an icon, it represents an appealingly complete and taxonomically dissected
set.
Where we as mapmakers and theorists resist this meaning is when the map itself doesnt
actually hold up to that visually implied promise. No map is complete, even Carrolls and
Borges s 1:1 creations. Even within categories, we must make compromises and adjust for
the limitations of our knowledge and our ability to cram items onto a page. Maps dont lend
themselves to the representative sorts of taxonomical pictures we see in a Richard Scarry
book about peoples jobs: we dont expect to see each of the several thousand

Department of Labor job classifications represented in that book, but we do expect the
equivalent in a map.
One of the ways representative sets work is by making each instance a more fullydeveloped, even expressive entity. An alphabet book creates a cycle alternating between
expression and taxonomy. It names an entity in the taxonomic set (A is for...), and then
draws us into a narrative story: a character or an action or something else of interest. Then it
returns us to taxonomy for the next letter.
And mapped taxonomy doesnt have to look taxonomic. It is such a standard
feature of maps that we tend to gloss over it: features that in reality have soft edges are
shown with a clean, definite edge. Roads that peter out into gravel shoulder and grassy
verge are shown as cased lines; lakes that become wetlands that become soggy field are
shown as a solid blue with a crisp outline.
There really isnt a good theoretical reason for this. In practical terms, it is easier to draw a
hard-edged shape than it is to consistently draw a soft and variable gradation. Rasterbased techniques should make it easier to create soft map base artwork, whether directly
using aerial imagery(as in Google Earth), or in manipulating finely differentiated data to
create a painterly texture (as in Tom Pattersons Natural Earth).23 It is my hope that as time
goes by, we will see less an less of this unjustified hardness in our maps.
These sorts of soft edged raster techniques could also be used in portraying some of
the sorts of categories for which we customarily use hard edges. For example, imagine a
map showing the US not as continuous, delineated territories, but as areas of more or less
sympathy with the federal government (Republic of Texas strongholds in one color, military
bases in another), we would see a quite different sense of the nation.24
Discrete taxonomy is not just a province of background line and area imagery. When
we categorize points of interest, we regularly run into problems with conceptual boundaries:
bookstore which are also cafes, major entertainment venues which are also parks, towns
which are also counties. Sometimes we can overlay symbols, sometimes we can split or
over-hatch color symbolization. But a lot of the time the constraints of the map dictate that
we have to decide categories and live with the result.
Is there a way to express soft edges to classes of point symbols, and still maintain the
usefulness of symbolization? This would be an excellent subject for experimentation. In our
digital age, as we have found ways to process massive files of raster data and produce an
effective meaningful background image, we may be able to develop point symbol
systems that are simultaneously cohesive and expressive of individual variation.
An expressive place-picture may not be a true map, but it should be able to use
map language. The sort of unity of vision a truly expressive portrait of a place requires is
hard to imagine with a fully taxonomized symbol set dominating the image. Using a
compelling and rich soft raster image as described above will help, but do not represent
the sort of detailed vision or experience I am lookg for.
Perhaps it would be helpful to think of such an image not as a map, but as a placepicture. Raven Images adopted a similar strategy in titling its hypsometric/shaded relief
images. The creator, Stuart Allen, will freely admit the overlay of mappy, taxonomic
information is meant as a reference to the meat of the pictures, which portray but do not
discretely delineate landforms.
Finally, I return to childrens books as a source for visual ideas. So much of young
23

See Tom Pattersons web site www.shadedrelief.com for more information about Natural Earth.
The germ of this idea can be seen in Lester J Cappon, ed. The Atlas of Early American History: the
Revolutionary Era, 1760-1790 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). In a series of maps, the
difference is shown between de jure territorial claims and de facto extent of the colonial rule of law. In both
cases, however, the area are shown with hard outlines, whereas the actual frontier was presumably
somewhat porous.
24

childrens litereature is made up two of every animal listmaking, it would seem to be a

natural fit for mapmakers. Perhaps instead of simply using bright colors and cartoon
characters, we should look at how to make a childrens map that works as well as a good
alphabet book, and perhaps such an exercise would give us hints how to expand the adult
map world as well.
CONCLUSION
Can we make maps that transmit feeling? Yes, but the map maker must construct it
as such from the ground up, considering such questions as:
From whose point of view will the map be drawn? How will the viewer perceive that
point of view?
Are the elements that are supposed carry feeling drawn at a scale that allows the
viewer to believe them as subjects of full attention, not bit-players?
Do all the elementsforeground and background, labeled and unlabeled,
taxonomized and generalizedeither express feeling, or to frame and ground it in an
understandable context?
How can we tell a graphic story about a place? Consider an example from the
comic book world. The dust jacket for Chris Wares Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on
Earth is a diagrammatic representation of spatial, chronological, causal, familial, and
cosmological relationships among various characters in the book. By taking snippets of
story and character, isolating them in frames and relating them as a diagram, Ware has made
a fascinating non-linear narrative, a graphically and conceptually sophisticated version of a
choose your own ending hypertext narrative. The flow isnt just narrative: while some of
the links and chains of images flow causally, most (as with any good map) are equally
interesting if they are followed in either direction.25
I want to see this done with a conventional map, with the subject not a persons family
history and place in the cosmos, but the place of a town, region, or other geographic area. I
want to see a structure that zooms from the factual to the narrative to the speculative to the
practically theological, using insets within insets, graphic themes that cross between maps
and other graphics, revealing new territories both conceptual and spatial.
I am looking for is something like the ideal of mapmaking expressed in Barry Lopezs
The Mappist. The storys mapmaker, Corlis Benefideo, has a genius for creating maps
and guide books that communicate a felt sense of place. The narrator spends years tracking
Benefideo down, and finds him fully detached from the deadline-heavy, progress-driven
world of conventional mapping. Instead, he is working in a small North Dakota farmhouse on
his magnum opus, an exhaustive series of hand-drawn maps of that state. As the narrator
views the maps, he sees in each one a story, laid out and described with exactitude and
love. About one of Benefideos earlier works, the narrator writes, I knew nothing of Bogot,
but felt the author had captured its essence. My view was that [the author] had not written a
travel book but a work about the soul of Bogot.26
Lopezs vision is appealing, and my major quibble is that for him, such a mapmaker
must work outside the modern worlds of mapping and art. I am not so pessimistic as Lopez
about the worlds friendliness to great expressive work. Wares critical success encourages
me to think that when a Benefideo appears, he or she will not have to hide his light under a
bushel.
How can we picture a place and in so doing make it our own? The YMCA hired
interactive designers Mighty Media to create a web-based community-mapping program
25
26

Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, New York: Pantheon, 2000
Barry Lopez, The Mappist, in Light Action in the Caribbean, New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000, 146-162.

for teens. Impact Plus is a prepackaged process for placing a map image on a web site,
tagging it, and using the result to help solve a community need. Most participants used
predictable map bases: government and commercial street maps and some aerial
imagery. But a few drew their own maps. In particular, one group created a model of their
town out of Play-doh and used a photograph of their model as their base.
The result is a little the Mister Rogers Neighborhood title sequence: we see the
locations important to the group, arranged to show their proximity. The portrayal
emphasizes their human scale. The result is friendly in a way maps almost never are.27
Tagged pictures have the potential to redefine the general concept of maps. As Google
Maps evolves and as competitors arrive on the scene, the use of authoritative base
mapping, while it will probably always be a default, may cease to be automatic. Tagging
lets map makers lay deep and data-rich content on any image, in any configuration. Theres
no reason why creative, homegrown solutions to background image problems shouldnt
become commonplace.
As mapping becomes the next area of communication where amateur participation
becomes the norm, the possibilities for arts-influenced work is enormous. I hope the
emerging frameworks will allow user creation at all levels, like the YMCA project, and not
just present prepackaged imagery to work from, as the major online map servers do now.
What do we call an expressive place-pictures? On one hand, I want to simply
ignore the ontologies of map and art, picture and argument, text and image, and focus on
the variety of tools laid out before us. I want to find the best techiniques to solve specific
problems of picture-making (or argument-making, or whatever you want to call it). I want to
just not worry about what we call the process or the end product.
On the other hand, I am part of a publishing company which has tried, however
modestly, to break across market sectors and publish kinds of products that hadnt been
made before. I can testify that those market forces and the taxonomies they themselves
represent are very powerful forces.
We cannot simply ignore expectations of our audience, whether that audience is made
up of end users or the people running distribution networks. A street map with pink water,
and orange parks will confuse people, as is any map that confounds expectations without
good reason. Conversely, someone who advertises themselves as an artist and sells work
through a gallery, and then uses the gallery space as a way to sell Rand McNally street
atlases, will probably get a chilly reception from the art world.
As mapmakers, we make tools. As artists, we turn the world slantwise so our audiences
can see it anew. As rhetoricians, we construct airtight arguments to turn our audiences mind.
Instead of looking to these identities to form the boundaries of our individual practices,
lets agree that we seek to describe the world for a variety of aims. In describing that world,
we use a variety of conceptual and practical tools, which may legitimately be used for other
aims?
Lets look for projects in which we can use tools currently foreign to our usual practice, to
create place-pictures, or earth-pictures (or whatever you want to call them) that ignore
existing bounds of map making and art. We might simultaneously meet expectations in
more than one of our regular arenas, and perhaps create new schools of picture-making
altogether.

27

Thanks to Mike Tuminelly of Mighty Media for bringing these images to my attention. The gateway to all
the groups maps is at www.impactplus.org/groupList.cfm.