Cartographic Practices Research Articles

O que pode um corpo-marcado na escola?

Este artigo anuncia e enuncia o conceito de corpo-marcado, para lançar luz a marcas que podem se concretizar nos corpos em meio a diferentes dispositivos. Em especial, debruça-se sobre o dispositivo Escola e professores que nela ensinam para refl etir sobre o tema “corpo e educação”, propondo-se a pensar O que pode um corpomarcado na Escola? Como mobilizar e produzir marcas outras para aumentar a potência de agir? Para isso, assumiu uma prática cartográfi ca para produzir um mapa que pudesse expor, fraturar e problematizar as relações de poder que se constituem, a partir de uma experiência sensível com um grupo de professores, em meio a dois espaços de encontros, o primeiro organizado pela própria escola, o segundo pela primeira autora deste artigo. A produção do artigo assumiu uma política de escrita híbrida, em que línguas espanhola e portuguesa fazem parte de uma mesma composição, por entender que essa forma daria vazão aos afetos que pediam passagem. Como resultado, dá a ver o corpo-marcado como constituído junto a narrativas da modernidade com marcas que podem ser utilizadas de modo a transgredi-las, ao pensá-lo como um epicentro da experiência e, assim, potenciar marcas outras, que permitam a existência e o fl uxo das diferenças.

Going on a Field Trip: Critical Geographical Walking Tours and Tactical Media as Urban Praxis in Sydney, Australia

Going on a Field Trip: Critical Geographical Walking Tours and Tactical Media as Urban Praxis in Sydney, Australia

Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Topographic Mapping of the Balkans

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we analyse the nineteenth-century Ottoman cartographic activities and map production in the European parts of their empire. Already weakened by centuries of wars, the Ottoman Empire, in its late phase of territorial regression, had to find a way to compensate the absence of its own mapping activities. That especially came to the fore when the interest of the Ottoman administration in the mapping of the European part of its empire was stimulated by the requirements of its military operations during the Russo-Turkish Wars, as well as by the consequent geopolitical changes that occurred with the independence of certain parts of the empire (Greece, Wallachia and Moldavia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria). The solution was found in translating European, mostly Austrian and Russian, topographic maps into the Ottoman Turkish language. This practice resulted in the production of topographic maps that met the military needs of the Ottoman army, but also in a gradual transfer of the Western science and cartographic practice to the Ottoman culture.

Cartografia escolar e inclusiva: repensar e reinventar práticas na educação básica e no ensino superior

Esse artigo tem como objetivo principal apresentar e discutir experiências com a Cartografia Escolar e Inclusiva na educação básica e na formação docente no ensino superior. Para isso optamos por dividir o nosso texto em duas partes. A primeira centrar-se-á nas experiências do primeiro autor como docente no âmbito da disciplina Cartografia Escolar e Inclusiva, do curso de Graduação em Geografia da Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho” (UNESP), campus de Rio Claro/SP. Esta parte focaliza as concepções e aplicações dos materiais, elaborados por parte dos discentes desta disciplina, no Centro-Dia de Referência ao Deficiente de Rio Claro/ sp. A outra parte do artigo tratará das práticas desenvolvidas com os alunos das séries iniciais do Ensino Fundamental II em um colégio da mesma cidade. Neste momento, o segundo autor apresenta atividades nas quais tecnologias digitais se unem ao trabalho manual coletivo na criação de cartografias que efetivamente operaram na construção do conhecimento. Em ambas as situações, a Cartografia reafirmou-se enquanto linguagem indissociável do ensino de Geografia já que ela possibilita a espacialização (inclusive lúdica e imaginativa) dos fenômenos e também a busca de informações para interpretá-los. Portanto, este perfazer de experiências sistematizadas, pretende suscitar a reflexão sobre as experiências dos docentes e a necessidade de repensar e reinventar práticas cartográficas transformadoras e que tenham significado para os envolvidos nesse processo.

Ephemeral cartography: on mapping sound

ABSTRACTWith the concurrent rise of internet cartography (e.g. Google Maps) and low-cost digital audio recording devices, soundmapping has become a widespread phenomenon. But soundmapping has a much longer history, reaching back centuries and arguably millennia. Taking a kind of media archaeological approach to such cartographic practices, I consider a number of approaches that have been used historically in systematically combining sound and mapping and offer a rough media taxonomy to elucidate the particular relationships between them (e.g. mappings in sound, of sound, etc.). I begin with Homeric epic and then move through medieval mappae mundi, Ottoman nautical charts, linguistic atlases and sonar. My historical endpoint is a cluster of practices that (usually implicitly) constitute the beginning of contemporary analysis of soundmapping: the soundscape, both in its well-known form, as articulated by Murray Schafer, but also in the work of Michael Southworth, whose ground-breaking mapping practices influenced Schafer’s own ideas about sonic cartography. Beyond this archaeological rethinking of origins, I also seek to rethink mapping generally from the perspective of soundmapping: not only do soundmaps remind us of the audiovisual mediations of mapping more generally, they specifically assert the temporality of experiencing all maps, whether explicitly sonic or not.

On Cartographic Techniques in Literature

AbstractMy article investigates the manifold interactions between textual and diagrammatic elements. First, it outlines the changes in literary and cultural studies in the wake of the so-called ‘topographical turn,’ which have made possible the identification of certain cartographic practices as cultural techniques. Second, it discusses Friedrich Kittler’s idea of literature as a cultural technique itself, and considers how this concept can be reconciled with the topographical turn. Third, it analyses a handful of cartographic techniques employed in narratives and argues for a field of scriptural operations that provide a common ground for jointly reading maps and novels. Fourth, it carries out a reading of Thomas Pynchon’sGravity’s Rainbowwhich focuses on how the diagrammatic inscription of the V2 rocket and its arc condition both the protagonists’ movement on the novel’s plane and the map-making instances in the narrative. Fifth and finally, it points out why Pynchon’s work might be considered a medial counterpart of a map if the topographical approach, instead of being considered a comparison between fictional and real locations, is understood as a scrutiny into the operations indispensable to creating a fictional territory.

Exklusionseffekte kartographischer Epistemologien — Gedanken zu den Mapping-Paradigmen von OpenStreetMap und Wikimapia

Although the emergence of collaborative online mapping platforms has radically lowered access barriers to cartographic practices, many studies have shown how participation in online mapping is biased socially towards more privileged groups and geographically towards higher income regions. Yet, exclusion-mechanisms beyond those socio-economic divides have hardly been considered so far. Adding one such possible cause of social exclusion that is not directly linked to socio-economic factors, this paper makes an argument for the consideration of cartographic epistemologies. We illustrate the exclusion-mechanisms of cartographic epistemologies through two exemplary case studies, focusing on the ground-truth agenda of OSM and on Wikimapia's endeavor to describe the world.

Beyond Mapping: Seizing Affective Geographies in Toronto

In this article, I use a recent research creation project and its mobile component (the TiP lab) to emphasize the importance of regarding the city as an entanglement of sometimes evident, sometimes hidden naturecultural geographies and more-than-human encounters. While official narratives are not interested in narrating such vibrant multidimensionality, traditional cartographic practices do not seem to be able to seize them. In exploring ways to illuminate such complexity, I interrogate the ability of contemporary mapping devices to capture, and valorize, the vectors through which the human and the nonhuman, people and infrastructures shape the urban landscapes in which they live and through which they pass.

Maputopias: cartographies of communication, coordination and action—the cases of Ushahidi and InfoAmazonia

Maps have been established as objects bestowed with knowledge, power and impact. In the hands of people, maps have been a form of political counter-power. The emergence of digital cartography, mobile media, data crowdsourcing platforms and geographic information systems strengthens the maps’ muscle and coincides with a growing interest in crisis and activist mapping, a practice that blends the capabilities of the geoweb with humanitarian assistance and campaigning. Based on empirical observation, case studies and interviews, this article analyses the emergence of digital cartography as a new paradigm in activism and humanitarianism by examining how two platforms—Ushahidi and InfoAmazonia—use maps. Ushahidi was created in 2008 in Kenya, marking the beginning of geoactivism, which employs digital cartography and often crowdsourced data to provide alternative narratives and spaces for communication and action. InfoAmazonia—dedicated to environmental issues and human rights in the Amazon region—was created in 2012. Since then, other geoactivist initiatives proliferated, presenting three different outcomes in the shape of a paradigm shift, several disruptions and criticism. This study examines these consequences, scrutinising how humanitarianism and activism—as fields of power and knowledge—are being reconfigured by new cartographic practices.

Carto-fiction: narrativising maps through creative writing

This study reacts to the recent call for a narrativisation of maps’ life in post-representational cartography, proposing ‘cartographic fictional writing’ as a means to move geography’s ‘creative (re)turn’ from a place-centred to a ‘carto-centred’ perspective, and as an epistemological tool to go on rethinking maps from post-representational perspectives. First, ‘carto-fiction’ is defined as a self-reflexive (autoethnographic), ethnofictional, creative carto-centred product/practice of research. Second, by including the entire short story entitled ‘Unfolding Berlin’ and an autoethnographic account on how it emerged, this study strives to both theorise and perform carto-fictional writing as an embodied and trans-subjective mapping experience. My goal is to propose ‘carto-fiction’ as a prolific tool to let emotional, subjective cartographies emerge and to narrativise maps as mapping practices. The article further strives to focus on the mapping power of creative writing, and carto-fictional writing and reading will be interpreted as mapping performances, in which subjects are bodily and emotionally engaged. The inclusion of original illustrations aims to involve readers in a visual experience and to further stimulate their spatial imagination: each reader is asked to reflect on his/her own mapping experiences to interpret the fictional story and, thus, the paper itself attempts to unfold unpredicted creative cartographic practices.

“You know you can do this, right?”: developing geospatial technological pedagogical content knowledge and enhancing teachers’ cartographic practices with socio-environmental science investigations

ABSTRACTMany barriers exist to K–12 classroom teachers’ adoption and implementation of geospatial technologies with their students. To address this circumstance, we have developed and implemented a geospatial curriculum approach to promote teachers’ professional growth with curriculum-linked professional development (PD) to support the adoption of socio-environmental science investigations (SESI) in an urban school environment that includes reluctant learners. SESI focus on social issues related to environmental science. The pedagogy is inquiry-driven, with students engaged in map-based mobile data collection and subsequent analysis with Web-based dynamic mapping software to answer open-ended questions. Working with four science and social studies teachers, we designed and implemented a sequence of three locally oriented, geospatial inquiry projects that were implemented with 140 9th grade students. We investigated how the geospatial curriculum approach impacted the teachers’ geospatial pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), their cartographic practices, and promoted geospatial thinking and analysis skills with their students. Findings revealed strong growth in teachers’ geospatial PCK, increased map use by teachers, use of maps as media for inquiry and not didactic instruction, and modeling to guide students’ geospatial analysis using GIS. Implications for PD to promote teachers’ geospatial PCK and in-class cartographic practices are discussed.

How geopolitical conflict shapes the mass-produced online map

Cartographers have always grappled with the question of how to depict spaces of conflict where place names or boundaries are disputed. We examine how these conflicts are represented in mass-produced online maps with a worldwide audience, focusing on both commercial maps produced by tech giants such as Google, and crowdsourced efforts such as OpenStreetMap. Producers of these maps occasionally publish policies on conflict resolution, emphasizing the mapping of ground truth and conformance to internationally recognized specifications. In practice, the makers of these maps violate their own appeals to neutrality and ground truth by (1) producing customized versions of the map tailored to local laws or expectations; and, (2) introducing ambiguity through the selective addition or omission of information in sensitive locations. We provide examples of these customization and ambiguity practices in commercial and crowdsourced maps. We demonstrate how commercial maps can appear in any number of versions to satisfy disputing parties, and crowdsourced maps can undergo “rogue customizations” for varying time periods as irredentist or separatist contributors seek for avenues to express their causes to a worldwide audience. We reflect on the long-term viability of customization and ambiguity as cartographic practices, commenting on ways that they shape — and are shaped by — the conflict on the ground and power of involved actors. Behind the seamless navigation of the Web 2.0 world map lies a patchwork of contributor motives and worldviews that complicates an understanding of ground truth and warrants interpretation through the lens of critical cartography.

Converging interests and scientific circulation between Paris and Beijing (1685-1735): The path towards a new Qing cartographic practice

Dans les premières années du xviii e siècle, la Chine des Qing a entrepris l’un des plus grands projets cartographiques des débuts du monde moderne, projet dont le résultat est l’édition d’un ensemble impressionnant d’atlas connus sous le nom de Cartes générales des territoires impériaux ou Huangyu quanlan tu 皇 輿 全 覽 圖. Dans le cadre de ce projet sans précédent, la cour de Pékin établit une nouvelle pratique du relevé cartographique qui combinait des pratiques héritées avec de nouvelles techniques géométriques et d’observation. Ces nouvelles techniques ont été introduites par certains des missionnaires européens au service de cette cour, dont la plupart étaient des Jésuites français envoyés en Chine en 1685 par Louis XIV et parrainés par l’Académie des sciences. Cet article retrace la circulation des instruments et des techniques d’arpentage de Paris à Pékin, leur reconfiguration et leur transformation en Asie, ainsi que la création de nouvelles pratiques de relevé cartographique par la cour des Qing.

Blurring the Boundaries: Integrating Techniques of Land Surveying on the Qing’s Mongolian Frontier

This article focuses on the role of spatial dynamics in effectuating the integration of two different sets of land surveying techniques. During the later stages of the Qing-Zunghar wars of the 1690s, the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722) repeatedly asked French Jesuit missionaries, who had been sent to China in 1685 under the patronage of the French King Louis XIV, to join his imperial campaigns targeting the Khalkha-Mongolian borderlands. In the shadow of these imperial journeys, missionaries systematically determined latitudes with Paris-made instruments while Qing officials measured road distances all along the way with graduated ropes. A next step in the evolution of imperial cartographic practice came after the Qing- Zunghar wars had come to an end, when an all-out effort was launched by the emperor to integrate the newly conquered Khalkha Mongols and their lands into the Qing polity. As part of the effort, missionaries were asked to produce a map of the new frontier by integrating European and East Asian practices, which led to the discovery of a technical incompatibility. In 1702, the problem was solved by the precise measurement of the terrestrial degree and, immediately after, the restandardization of the Qing’s most basic unit of length, the chi 尺. Thus, I argue that the turn of the eighteenth century saw the crystallization of a new or hybrid Qing cartographic practice, driven by the need to explore the new Khalkha frontier. More concretely, I show how selected techniques as developed by the French Academy of Sciences were gradually absorbed into a pre-existing framework of Qing land surveying, a process that was shaped and facilitated by exchanges in via throughout the vast Mongolian frontier.

Not Just a Jesuit Atlas of China: Qing Imperial Cartography and Its European Connections

In the literature, the ‘Overview Maps of Imperial Territories’ or Huangyu quanlan tu 皇輿全覽圖, is mostly referred to as ‘the Jesuit atlas of China’. The reason is that this early eighteenth-century atlas of all Qing China’s territories plus Korea and Tibet is assumed to have resulted from European missionaries importing European cartographic practices. In this essay, I argue that this view is outdated and can no longer be sustained. By revisiting the background of the missionaries’ involvement in cartographic exchanges between Asia and Europe, the techniques used for surveying Qing territories and the production of the resulting atlases, I show that the mapping project behind the ‘Overview Maps of Imperial Territories’ is best understood as a creative answer to the unique needs of Qing frontier management and imperial control, made possible by the integration, in mensurational and in representational terms, of European and East Asian cartographic practices.

From Field Data to Ecosystem Services Maps: Using Regressions for the Case of Deforested Areas Within the Amazon

Quantifying and mapping ecosystem services (ES) is seen as one way to improve decision making and land management to better integrate environmental issues. This study aimed to characterize ES supply in deforestation context where an improvement of scientific knowledge should help develop more efficient environmental management. For three case studies in the Brazilian Amazon impacted by deforestation, seven indicators of potential ES supply were mapped at a spatial resolution of 30 × 30 m: biodiversity index (indicator of food web support); richness of pollinators (pollination); index of soil chemical quality (support to production); water available for plants (water regulation); soil carbon stocks (support to production and climate regulation); rate of water infiltration into the soil (soil erosion control); and vegetation carbon stocks (climate regulation). To map these indicators, in situ measurements of ES for 135 sampling points and remote sensing data were linked using regression methods. These methods were used to predict ES values and identify environmental factors that influence ES supply. The resulting maps help in understanding the influence of environmental factors on ES spatial distribution within the sites. The analyses illustrate the influence of land-use changes on ES supply and the role of context effects due to the heterogeneity of the biophysical environment, the temporality of deforestation and/or their diversified sociopolitical contexts. From a methodological viewpoint, the study highlights the importance of choices inherent in all cartographic practices and that need to be considered, especially in the context of rendering ES maps operational.

Another Perspective on the Peters Projection Controversy — Empirical Research on World Maps and Globes

Today, we can choose between approximately 250 map projections. However, cartographic practice is dominated by just a few of them, and constant discussion is held on the most suitable way of mapping the world. In this paper, we will approach this discussion via the Peters projection controversy. A review of this controversy will allow us to highlight several shortcomings inherent to the current discourse on world maps and globes by mainstream cartography, among them a lack of empirical research. Drawing upon evidence from cartographic history, I will show that main aspects for a comprehensive analysis were already considered by ancient mapmakers. I will also summarize different viewpoints empirical research can take on globes and maps. As we shall see from this discussion, designing a world map is not only an issue of projection. Also map edges and seamless visualization on a globe shape the user’s spatial mind.

Die Welt in Karten. Umbrüche und Kontinuitäten im Mittelalter

AbstractThis paper addresses the changes and continuities within the wide range of cartographic practices that existed in the Middle Ages. Following introductory thoughts on methodological issues, the text focuses on three different types of maps, all of which represent the world in its entirety: schematic maps, world maps and nautical charts. Within different texts, as independent artifacts or as atlases, these maps were employed for diverse purposes, such as the representation of fundamental principles, of encyclopaedic knowledge or of nautical surveys. At least from the twelfth century on, the different genres existed side by side – with adjustments of content and form occurring in each. By relating spacial order and historical content medieval maps produce meaning and assert the significance of the knowledge they display. The literal and philosophical world-views they provide make them valuable sources in modern education.

Mapping cinema memories: Emotional geographies of cinemagoing in Rome in the 1950s

This article, based on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project ‘In Search of Italian Cinema Audiences in the 1940s and 1950s: Gender, Genre and National Identity’, explores the power of geovisualization for capturing the affective geographies of cinema audiences. This mapping technique, used in our project to interrogate the Italian exhibition sector as well as to map film distribution, is used to illustrate the affective and emotional dimensions of cartographic practices related to memory. The article first examines the imbrication of memory and space, before moving on to a discussion of our mapping of the memories of one single respondent and the questions this mapping raises about geographical and remembered space, mobility and the relation between mapping and life-cycles.

On China's Cartographic Embrace: A View from Its Northern Rim

Although relations between China and Mongolia are good, with no outstanding territorial disputes, Mongolia continues to view its southern neighbor with considerable anxiety. Numerous paranoid narratives circulate, hinting at China's alleged malevolent intentions, and many Mongols are convinced that China is intent on a takeover. This article argues that this anxiety is located in two particular cartographic gaps. The first is the misalignment between People's Republic of China (PRC) and Republic of China (ROC) maps, namely the fact that Taiwanese maps include Mongolia within the boundaries of China. For the majority of Mongolian viewers who do not read Chinese, this constitutes a clear case of cartographic aggression. The second gap is found in cultural-historical maps of China that portray large swaths of northern Asia as regions formerly inhabited by Chinese. While neither map constitutes a political claim, the Chinese cultural imaginary each portrays posits Mongolia as “not quite foreign.” Rather than “cartographic aggression,” the term “cartographic embrace” may be a better designation here. Even if Chinese cartographic practices do not index intent, for countries like Mongolia—whose political existence is founded on separation from China—cultural “embrace” can be even more threatening.