Cartography as Engagement

Abstract

When addressing at the question: ‘What does Cartography mean to you?’ I reflected on my career in Cartography in order to properly provide an answer. At the very core of what it means to me is drawing the map and the very poetics of what we do to make maps ‘work’. However, it is more than the design and drawing (in its widest sense) of the map. It is the engagement in thinking about, developing and considering various design iterations and finally drawing the map. These process of problemsolving means that we need to think about the logics ‘behind’ the cartographic process, as well be attuned to what is actually feasible/possible for replicating and communicating the completed drawing, software, computer package or integrated media suite. My time in cartography has taken me from the era of pen and ink, to photo-mechanical production, to the early days of computer-assisted cartography, to digital cartography to the application of DeskTop Publishing to map production, to multimedia, the Web, to mobile mapping and, now, to the era of ubiquitous map provision and collaboration in cartography. When I started my career in cartography it was in the era of pen and ink. I worked for Shell Exploration as a cartographer. Here, the engagement with cartography was the design of a geologic or geophysical map, compiling information from (paper) resources, preparing the draughting film, constructing the grid, plotting the information from geologists fieldnotes (in pencil – probably a 5H, sharpened within an inch of its life with sandpaper), drawing lines with Rotring pens and adding lettering with Wrico lettering guides. Those hand-drawn lines and letters on plastic draughting film, once reproduced on a diazo printing machine, were used as tools to assist in making decisions about whether to embark on a costly geological exploration and drilling project. The engagement here was both a mental process (of map design – considering how all of the elements ‘fitted’ and accorded to geological mapping standards – and a tactile experience – actually handling the tools and making contact with the plastic draughting film, film cleaning pads, metal weights, Rotring pens and Wrico lettering guides, metal straight edges, erasers and razor blades. This engagement was rewarded through pleasure of completing a design, and drawing it by hand. The tactual experience of handling materials and manipulating tools resulted in a technical document that conveyed information from the geologist’s field book to decisionmakers. Unfortunately, my experience with scribing did not quite cut it – in terms of engagement. I really couldn’t become as engaged with the process of removing an emulsion from the top of stable plastics using a sapphire scribing tip. Yes, the process was accurate, produced standardized media and was quick, but the engagement was not the same as the tactual experience of actually drawing. The associated photomechanical processes were a bit different, especially when completing non-standard jobs. Manipulating images during the developing process was an art as well as a science, and techniques like warming parts of the photographic emulsion in certain areas of the film by hand to change the development process in that area produced some satisfying work outputs. I guess that there was more engagement with the photo-mechanical process. This was not so for me with scribing, perhaps due to the fact that what one could do with a drawing was more controlled.