Becoming Strangers: Travel, Trust, and the Everyday

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Becoming Strangers Travel, Trust, and the
Everyday

• Day 23 Maps and Mapping

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What Is a Map?
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The Oxford English Dictionary Speaketh

• MAP. A drawing or other representation of the
  earth's surface or a part of it made on a flat
  surface, showing the distribution of physical or
  geographical features (and often also including
  socio-economic, political, agricultural,
  meteorological, etc., information), with each
  point in the representation corresponding to an
  actual geographical position according to a fixed
  scale or projection a similar representation of
  the positions of stars in the sky, the surface of
  a planet, or the like. Also a plan of the form
  or layout of something, as a route, a building,
  etc.

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Is This Definition 100 Accurate?
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Cartography A Crash Course

• Cartographers distinguish the following kinds of
  tools
• PLAT a graphical representation used for
  determining boundaries land ownership
• CHART used for navigational purposes
• MAP used for general reference purposes
• Each of these tools has different (though
  intersecting) histories. The purposes that
  they serve have varied greatly from era to era.
• Beware cartographers, like everyday people,
  will use map both in the above specialized
  sense and as an umbrella term covering plats,
  charts, and (the more narrowly defined version
  of) maps.

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Plats The Oldest Maps

• Oldest surviving maps are plats from
  Mesopotamia dating from ca. 2300 BCE schematic
  drawings with accompanying cuneiform text.
• It was crucial in Mesopotamia (and later Egypt)
  to keep track of boundaries between farms the
  annual floods erased most landmarks.

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Charts How to Get There

• Appears that charts predate literacy.
• Originally very much embedded in an oral culture.
  The chart would be drawn while directions were
  given. Few or no names provided on the chart
  scale unimportant. Essentially, a presentation
  of prominent or famous landmarks in a particular
  sequence.
• Sometimes charts would be left to inform later
  travelers which way to go to reach a particular
  site, or which way to go to catch up with
  someone. Again minimal information provided,
  such as a few arrows and signs on birch back, or
  a few glyphs on a rock in a desert.

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Ak Ko Mok Kis Map (1801)

• Ak Ko Mok Ki, a Blackfoot chief from the Great
  Plains, charted Western North America for Peter
  Fidler, a surveyor from the Hudson Bay Company.
• The Pacific Ocean is at the top. The Rocky
  Mountains appear in the middle as a double line.
  Single lines are rivers. The numbered circles
  are tribes, with names provided by an
  accompanying key.

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Oceans are Dangerous!

• Sailing on the ocean required good informationor
  else you wreck lose lots of money lives.
• In Mediterranean and Europe, very detailed shore
  charts (peripla) begin appearing in classical
  times.
• You had to know where the islands, how deep the
  water, what rivers navigable, etc.

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Age of Discovery and Charts

• European voyages across Atlantic and into Pacific
  required charting the open ocean.
• This led to very elaborate accurate devices for
  determining your precise location. These ocean
  maps are the origins of the present-day (Western)
  assumption that maps are to scale and
  faithful to geography. (If they werent, you
  were dead!)

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Maps Organizing the World

• Oldest map (in narrow sense) dates from ca. 650
  BCE.
• It depicts the city of Babylon at the center of a
  disk of lands surrounded by the bitter river.
• Faithful not to geographic fact but to a
  worldview.

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Pawnee Star Chart

• Taken in 1906 from a bundle of artifacts sacred
  to the Pawnee.
• Depicts earthly sites and stars superimposed in
  same space.
• Directional arrows indicate whether a site is
  ascending (earthly) or descending
  (celestial).
• One is believed to walk in both realms
  simultaneously.

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Fifty Nifty United States . . .
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Jasper Johns, Map (1961)
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Imaginary Maps?
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Imaginary Map?
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Julie Mehretu

• Born 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Father is
  Ethiopian, mother is from Alabama.
• Grows up in Michigan, educated in Senegal Rhode
  Island.
• Currently resides in New York.
• Art is based on aerial maps, maps of airports,
  architectural drawings, city maps, public
  transport maps, and other common kinds of maps.

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Julie Mehretu, Congress (2003)
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Up Close Viewing
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Julie Mehretu, Renegade Delirium (2002)
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Julie Mehretu, Ruffian Logistics (2001)
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Julie Mehretu at the Walker Arts Center
While in residence at the Walker Arts Center in
Minneapolis, Mehretu interviewed 30 high school
students of East African descent and created a
web site mapping the region from their
perspectives.