Is it finally re-envision modern world maps?
Back in the month of May, during his electoral strategy to annex Canada, a prominent political figure labeled the dividing line with Canada a man-made division that was plotted without consideration “cutting across the northern section of the nation”. He opined that the cartographic image of the continent would be more coherent without it.
Historians observed that this boundary embodied a complex history and a daily existence for countless people, though they recognized that his point had merit. A significant stretch of this boundary closely tracks a geometric line – and the representatives who negotiated it had little knowledge concerning the landscape.
This statement underscored the reality that the cartographic tools commonly used in education project an overly neat view of the world – one divided into homogeneous blocks that allows for minimal questioning to its supposed accuracy, comprehensive knowledge or veracity.
Scholar an authority on maps attributes this mindset to 1700s English mapmakers who created “geography puzzles” as teaching aids for students from privileged backgrounds. These maps, which represented nations with clear-cut frontiers and also functioned as early puzzles, remained a fixture of education for generations. They persistently affect our thinking today: what started out as a classroom activity transformed into a technique for illustrating variability in indicators like life expectancy or income levels, with each country-block illustrated with one statistic. “I think that causes significant harm, not only to our perception of those states, and to our perception of inequality,” says the scholar.
Advocacy for Cartographic Change
Some are now calling for a radical shift in mapping. Not long ago, researcher Henk van Houtum proposed a movement to “Emancipate Maps”. He proposes to exchange the country-centered view with a perspective that highlights movement and human connections. As he describes it, to swap the mythological titan, struggling under the weighty globe, for the swift deity – the wearer of winged sandals, messenger between worlds.
The scholar has deep knowledge of EU migration policy and immigration, which is routinely depicted in atlases via imposing vectors implying an incursion (for those old enough, think a classic opening sequence). “The impersonal, dominant arrow is essentially the perspective of the state,” he writes. “It underscores the assumed unity of the populace and the unusual nature of the border crossing by migrants.” Addressing such criticism, the continent's border management body has changed the menacing arrows in its visualizations with calmer – though still non-neutral – differently sized circles, and countless teachers have promised to revise the pictorial story in education.
Adopting New Cartographic Values
Meanwhile, the historian wants the science of maps to integrate different principles. The gathering of data and depiction of facts are imperfect human endeavors that require interpretation, he says. Instead of striving for neutrality, objectivity and sharp distinctions, cartographers must accept doubt, bias variety. His volume, entitled a pioneering book on maps, features maps that contradict the conventional wisdom.
One illustrates overseas voyages across five centuries from the early 1400s, not by highlighting sites of colonial claims, but the places they discovered that were devoid of human life. These amounted to “some islands and extensive ice fields”.
This provides insight about both the area of Earth humans had already settled by the middle ages, and concerning the actual discovery that followed. It contrasts with a historical chart of the New World featured in a show at a prestigious institution, that represents aboriginal areas as blank spaces, “to provide an impression that they were empty and free for appropriation,” comments a principal historian of historical maps.
The Role of Alternative Mapping
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