"Cartograph"
/update 23 Feb 2020: I have cleaned up some of the language, and to clarify some of the argument. As my brother noted, the insomnia was evident in some of the writing. I also happened to find, yesterday, an old to myself with a couple of neologisms coined to do the same work as “cartograph.”
update 22 March 2020: It occurs to me that I should be absolutely clear that this post refers only to usage in the English language and has nothing to say about words in other languages (such as the French term “cartographe” for a cartographer).
I’m currently enjoying a recently published science-fiction book: Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire. It is grand space opera of the political intrigue variety, sort of like Anne Leckie’s Ancillary series. The book’s plot is irrelevant to this post (so don’t worry, there are no spoilers!). I’m reacting only to a particular character’s name, which leads me to expand on and clarify a paragraph in Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (Edney 2019, 219), and to develop some further thoughts about how people have reacted in the twentieth century to the ideal of cartography and its normative conception of maps.
The Prompt
The space empire in A Memory Called Empire is based loosely on pre-hispanic Nahua (Aztec) culture and uses a Nahua-style system for naming its citizens. According to one very early Spanish account, from as early as 1527, Nahua children received a name based on the particular day on which they were born or on which they were named soon thereafter. The 260-day calendar contained twenty cycles, each of thirteen days and each associated with a variety of symbolic emblems; children were named by the number of the day and one of the relevant emblems. Thus, “All new-born children received the name of their birth day such as One Flower, or Two Rabbit, etc.” Nahua received other names too, and some of these further naming practices appear in the book as well. But the primary name of every imperial citizen is a number and a noun (animal, plant, concept, etc.) given by their parents. Early in the book, the protagonist (the newly arrived ambassador from a system beyond the empire) bonds with her imperial cultural liaison over their mutual amusement at the name chosen by a newly domiciled citizen who doesn’t quite get the concept: Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle. Also, there are diminutives derived from the substantive part of the name. Thus, the cultural liaison, Three Seagrass, is called Reed by a friend, Twelve Azalea, whom she in turn calls Petal.
What caught my attention is the name borne by the son of a political aide to one of the emperor’s inner circle: “Two Cartograph.” The aide further refers to her son affectionately as “Map.” (In chapter six, at location 135/462 in the kindle version I’m reading.)
“Cartograph” as a Back Formation
A back formation is a new word—a new part of speech or a new meaning—created when a real or supposed affix (generally a suffix) is dropped from an existing word. The verb “edit” is, for example, a back formation from the noun “editor”: the Latin verb ēdĕre, to put forth, has the past participle ēditus, from which derived both editor and edition via the French; the verb “edit” was not coined until ca. 1800. Because English commonly adds suffixes to verbs in order to make nouns, it is logical for speakers to presume that nouns which bear such suffixes were derived from a verb, so that the verb can be readily recreated, even when the verb form does not actually exist. Whereas most back formations seem to be verbs like “edit” that have been intuited from nouns, cartograph is a noun derived from another noun.
The complicating factor is that there are two common suffixes derived from the same ancient Greek verb γραφειν (graphein), to write. First, -graphy means “writing [on|with]” or “description.” Second, -graph, which was originally used to mean “that which is written,” appearing in such old words as “autograph.” (There is a third suffix, originally rare, -grapher, for the person doing the writing, as in “geographer”).
The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry on -graph has not been revised since 1900 and is a bit confusing. It suggests, however, that nineteenth-century practice created many pairs of nouns, ending respectively in -graphy and -graph. The first suffix was adopted for processes. -graph was then used in one of two senses: either (sense 1) instruments “that write, portray, or record,” such as “phonograph”; or (sense 2) the product of the processes, such as “photograph” or “lithograph.” It is clear from Twyman (1970, 4–5), for example, that “lithograph” and “lithography” were coeval. Lithograph and photograph, etc., are not back-formations.
The dropping of the -y from cartography creates such a noun pair: cartography, the process, and now cartograph the instrument or product of that process. The ease with which “cartograph” has been created and recreated, perhaps independently, stems from the apparent naturalness of the pairing. A -graphy calls for and perhaps even requires a complementary -graph.
(In line with the predominate function of back formation to create verbs, there has been something of a tendency after 1800 to form verbs by dropping -y from -graphy. Earlier -graph words are resolutely nouns. There is no verb “geograph” but in modern usage we do find “calligraph” as a back-formed verb when early forms were limited to calligraphy, the practice, and calligrapher, the person doing the process. I am sure that someone in phase 3 or 3a [below] has used cartograph as a verb; if so, they should stop doing so, at once!)
We know that cartograph is a back formation, unlike lithograph or photograph, because of the history of its use. “Cartography” itself was adopted in the 1820s, as if it were akin to the Greek word “geography” (lit. earth writing [description]). The neologism was coined specifically by Conrad Malte-Brun to refer to the emergent idealization of a single, universal endeavor of map making, in the sense of “writing maps” (Edney 2019, 114–20). Instances, in English at least, of “cartograph” are only a twentieth-century phenomenon. [n1]
Usage of the back formation of cartograph has not been consistent. More careful consideration of its usage, in light of the two senses in which -graph has been used in the modern era, suggests that cartograph has passed through three phases of usage, phases that can be seen in the following graph of the word from Google’s n-gram viewer:
Google n-gram for “cartograph” in the American English corpus. Fundamental problems in Google’s metadata and OCRing mean that the n-gram is valid only as a general indication of frequency and cannot be interpreted with any degree of precision (Nunberg 2009)
Phase 1. Instruments in the early 1900s
In the early twentieth century, cartograph was used to refer to a variety of technical innovations, in the OED’s sense 1: a new kind of alidade for plane tabling, a photogrammetric machine, a device for reading road maps as one drives (Edney 2019, 219). I have also encountered it in the name of an entire publishing company, the Cartograph Publishing Company of Philadelphia, about which I know nothing, but which seems to have been active from 1898 through 1914, and probably into the 1920s. [n2]
Phase 2 (1928–1960): Cartographs are pictorial maps
The use of cartograph in the OED’s sense 2 is unwarranted. After all, there is already a word for the product of cartography: map. The use of the back formation in this sense implies an abnormality sufficient to preclude reference to “the map.”
Specifically, cartograph seems to have been coined by Ruth Taylor Watson in 1928, to refer to her pictorial maps of Arizona, the Grand Canyon, and the American West (Griffin 2013, 7–9). Her work, which blended maps with cartoons, needed a label that permitted variety and nuance. The word caught on rapidly in the US, as in this Depression-era promotional work published by an agency of the Ohio state government:
Ohio Commission to A Century of Progress International Exposition, Being a Cartograph of Ohio: The Oldest State West of the Thirteen Original Colonies; now the Fourth State in the Union in Population; Third in Manufacture; Sixth in Minerals Mined; and among the Foremost in Agriculture (1934). Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine: http://www.oshermaps.org/map/45556.0001
In phase 2, cartograph was coined anew and adopted specifically to refer to spatial imagery that are clearly too abnormal to be properly considered as maps. The normative conception of maps is of truthful, accurate, and objective images that hide and obscure the people who made them (Wood 1992). They might as well be the works entirely of machines. But then this (apparently) new kind of image arises, whose playful character proclaims to the world that an artist had directly intervened in the cartographic process. These images did not just depict the landscape, they made arguments about the social and cultural nature of places and regions. Such images are sufficiently different from the normative map that they can’t even be thought of as qualified maps, as “pictorial maps,” but require their own special term: cartograph.
Originally, I daresay Taylor Watson used “cartograph” to claim standing as an innovative designer; such works were her idea, her invention. Yet its rapid adoption across the USA, by private designers and government agencies alike, indicate a wider anxiety that these highly effective images were nonetheless not genuine maps. The back formation inherited the authoritative mantle of “cartography,” assuaging such anxieties.
The limited application of “cartograph” to one kind of map entails a moderate critique: it subverts the normative map, but affirms the ideal of cartography. The segregation of pictorial maps as a special category of image served only to highlight the fact that the great majority of maps were indeed “real” and produced in adherence to scientific norms.
Phase 3 (1980+): Cartographs are the products of cartography
After 1980 there developed a further, more general usage of cartograph according to the OED’s sense 2. I think that this phase entailed the coinage of the word anew, perhaps several times, as scholars in a variety of fields increasingly rejected the normative conception of “the map.”
In this phase, cartograph has been used for many different kinds of map that do not adhere to the standards of cartographic science and the mechanistic depiction of landscape. I have found cartograph being used for maps by indigenous peoples, maps by landscape artists, maps of statistical surfaces, and so on (Edney 2019, 219). Such usages invert the previous relationship of cartograph to map: rather than cartographs being an abnormal kind of map that requires its own term to salve anxieties about their use, there now developed an idea that “the map” is itself too limiting a concept and that an alternative is required for the kinds of representations that image social and cultural phenomena that normative maps cannot show.
This sentiment is part and parcel of the subtle critique, evident for example in New England transcendentalism, of the inherent limitations of science. As Herman Melville famously began chapter six of Moby Dick (1892): “Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.”[n3] The attitude became a staple of anti-war/anti-science/anti-nuclear politics and academics in the 1960s and 1970s. As scholars across the humanities and social sciences began to ponder the nature of maps, there seemed a sense that modern, scalar maps were implicitly limited in showing cultural and personal impressions of place, and that they are inequitous tools of government. This is what Martin Brückner (2008, 3) called the “maps are bad syndrome.”
The expanded usage of cartograph manifests a tension within a major strand of map scholarship after 1980. Much work has been critical of the apparently monolithic practice of cartography. One of the many paradoxes built into the ideal of cartography is that cartography is understood to be, at once and without contradiction, (a) a universal endeavor carried on in all societies with a degree of economic sophistication, and (b) a particular formation of the West in the early modern and modern eras. As modern Western cartography continued to be criticized for its excesses, and as maps by pre- and non-Western peoples were increasingly accepted as sophisticated cultural works even if not meeting Western standards, “map” no longer is sufficient. “Map” stays restricted to being a product of modern Western cartography, so a new word is needed to refer to all of the huge array of spatial images that subsumes maps per se. And thus “cartograph” gets coined once more, for any product of cartography (a), because the particular products of cartography (b) are still called “maps” per se.
update 23 Feb 2020: the need to differentiate maps from other spatial images led Karen Pinto (2016, 2) to coin an alternate to cartograph, namely “carto-ideograph.”
update 23 Feb 2020: Phase 3 suggests a further stage in the meaning of “map”:
before 1800: “map” (or carte géographique or Landkarte) was used specifically for graphic works of geography, in distinction to chart or plan.
after 1800, the emergence of the ideal of a universal endeavor of cartography led to the adoption of a totally generic conception of map that encompassed all kinds of spatial imagery. Thus, the British Cartographic Society’s (1964) gloss on its definition of cartography: “In this context maps may be regarded as including all types of maps [!], plans, charts,….”
phase 2 of cartograph implies that the generic conception of map is not all-encompassing, and phase 3 implies that the generic map has become limited to the products of modern cartography and the mechanistic determination of landscape, so that there is a still greater and more generic conception of “map” that encompasses all spatial imagery.
In other words we have the lexical formation, over time, of a series of concentric circles: the center, created before 1800, the geographical map; the middle ring, created in the 1800s, the normative map, the product of cartography; and the outer ring, created only after 1980, the set of all maps.
A Phase 3a?
I now have to wonder, reading A Memory Called Empire, whether a further dimension to “cartograph” is emerging, a phase 3a or perhaps sufficiently distinct to constitute a phase 4. Rapidly developing digital technologies have exploded the old technical limitations of mapping. The visualizations being created with big data are pushing practices in new directions, opening up new vistas of imagery. We can imagine systems far grander, far more complex than a simple, flat map. (And remember, there are still some people who say globes are not maps because of their three-dimensional form.) In a science-fiction context, the need to map the weirdnesses of five-dimensional space becomes a task far beyond the capacity of “the map.”
update 23 Feb 2020: the proliferation in digital environments of “map-like representations” or “map-related" products” led Gyula Pápay in 2005 to coin the alternate neologism of “cartoid” (kartoid), as reported by Azócar and Buchroitner (2014, 62).
This is the context of Martine’s use of cartograph. When the ambassador encounters the five-year-old child, “Two Cartograph,” known familiarly as “Map,” he is playing with a holographic model of a solar system. There are other references in the book to star charts in the form of plane images, artistic sculptures, and holographs. In this respect, “cartograph” encompasses all factual, normative representations but in forms other than the traditional. It makes sense for a star-spanning empire to have such celestial models—it is a volumetric polity, after all—and it makes sense for an early twenty-first century writer to use cartograph for the whole ensemble of spatial representations, leaving map as a cute diminutive referencing an outmoded and perhaps obsolete form.
(This is not a total departure from phase 3: Martine also has a Melville moment: “Ignore the map; leave it behind. No maps are adequate for what has happened here..." [151/462].)
Conclusion
The back formation cartograph thus appears as a natural complement of cartography, but with overtones far more complex than with common, coeval -graphy/-graph pairs.
Usage of cartograph in the OED’s sense 2 has not been consistent. This usage depends on changing concepts of “map,” against which “cartograph” is implicitly contrasted. The existence of “map,” in its generic sense as a product of cartography as an idealized endeavor, requires that cartograph take on subversive aspects. In phase 2, the map is unequivocally the normal product of the cartographic process, so cartograph is used for abnormal products: images that are sort of maps, but not quite. In phase 3, as scholars challenge the normality of the map, so cartograph was recast as a super-category encompassing all forms of maps regardless of the cultural norms that shaped them, as opposed to the maps of modern Western culture: “there are more things in heaven and earth, Cartography, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Phase 3a is thus a sign that the academic critique is reaching beyond academia and has taken hold within lay culture generally.
My problem is that all these usages of cartograph cannot break away from the idea that there is a characteristic, essential Western “map.” Even as it seeks to subvert that idea, the use of “cartograph” serves only to perpetuate it: without the normative conception of the map, there would be, there could be, no cartograph.
What happens if we ditch the normative conception of the map? This is the argument of another major strand of critique in map studies. As map historians and some contemporarily minded map scholars actively embraced works that, before 1980, were rejected as irrelevant to the study of mapping and map history—works such as Taylor White’s pictorial maps and other phase 2 cartographs—they have broadened and softened the concept of “the map.” It is now impossible to define “the map.” From this perspective, to which I adhere, “map” encompasses the myriad products of all different spatial discourses. (Maps are, after all, epiphenomena of mapping processes.)
There is no need for “cartograph”; “map” is fine. There is no need to use a term that is implicitly set up in opposition or distinction to “map,” suggesting that “map” is some special, normative category. There is absolutely no need to base this oppositional term, this term that has come to be expansive and unrestricted, when it is a back formation of and implicitly paired with a term (cartography) that is itself the embodiment of everything that “cartogram” rejects. Cartography, alas, is still calling the shots.
Notes
This essay has been brought to you by insomnia.
n1. A new search via Google’s n-gram viewer has revealed an 1856 filing for an English patent by a Frenchman (Jean Baptiste Jules Hypolite d’Auvergne) for a portable writing desk that he called a “cartograph”—i.e., an instrument on which to write documents (carte in its generic French meaning); the patent application made no reference at all to maps.
n2. Google’s n-gram also threw up a 1927 curriculum from Long Beach, California, for Social Studies in grades 7 through 9, which suggested that geography should be taught in a room equipped with a map of the world, and map of the USA, a “Cartograph map of the United States,” and a “Cartograph map of the world.”
n3. According to Google Maps, there is one Kokovoko in the world: a restaurant by that name in Zemst, Belgium.
Works Cited
Azócar Fernández, Pablo Iván, and Manfred Ferdinand Buchroithner. 2014. Paradigms in Cartography: An Epistemological Review of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Heidelberg: Springer.
British Cartographic Society. 1964. “Definition of Cartography.” Cartographic Journal 1, no. 1: 17.
Brückner, Martin. 2008. “Beautiful Symmetry: John Melish, Material Culture, and Map Interpretation.” Portolan 73: 28–35.
Edney, Matthew H. 2019. Cartography: The Ideal and Its History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Griffin, Dori. 2013. Mapping Wonderlands: Illustrated Cartography of Arizona, 1912–1962. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Nunberg, Geoff. 2009. “Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck.” Language Log. 29 August 2009. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701.
Pinto, Karen C. 2016. Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Twyman, Michael. 1970. Lithography 1800–1850: The Techniques of Drawing on Stone in England and France and Their Application in Works of Topography. London: Oxford University Press.
Wood, Denis. 1992. The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford.
