Framing the Days: Place and Narrative in Cartography

Abstract

One of the themes of critical cartography is the question of how to map space as it is experienced. The conventions of Western cartographic language—the visual variables and their grammar—are structured to communicate spaces of homogeneity and modernity, not the spaces shaped by human experience. How then can we map place? I review some of the ways in which mapmakers have addressed this question in their visual and written works and propose another technique for uncovering place, using narrativity. Through the example of a historical map project, I consider the dialectic of place and narrative and demonstrate how this dialectic can be encoded in cartographic language.