Rethinking Maps and Mapping and How They Have Developed and Evolved

A fairly simple enquiry — how relevant is it to talk about the development and evolution of maps and mapping? — soon gets wrapped up in questions about the nature of “maps” and “mapping” and therefore how we define maps, cartography, map history, and map studies generally.

“On this primitive map, as the mother tree, was grafted the mathematical map and it is very interesting to observe, for how long a time the wild branches of the mother tree continued to grow up amidst the nobler shoots. There is still a struggle for life between the two types. This struggle was keenly fought in the Netherlands, where the primitive map reached its highest point of achievement. It is one of our aims in this publication to follow that struggle and to go back to earlier maps in order to explain the primitive features of the earliest mathematical maps.”

So wrote the Dutch map historian F. C. Wieder in the preface to the first volume of his Monumenta cartographica (1925–33, 1:x). This has just become my new favorite-quotation of the moment, being a highly unusual and early statement that models the history of maps on the biological metaphor of evolution. Wieder was not explicit, but his metaphors of the “tree,” its “branches,” and the “struggle for life” plainly reference Darwinian ideas of evolution and natural selection. At the same time, however, there is clear sense of development, in that the “primitive map” (one of pictures and iconography) could reach “its highest point of achievement.” The two processes were commonly combined in the early twentieth century in ideas of eugenics, seen here in the idea of the “nobler shoots” of the “mathematical map” that eventually won the struggle for life.

For the most part, however, map historians have used metaphors of biological development in writing their narratives of the history of cartography. Wieder’s use of a more overt evolutionary metaphor is actually quite rare until the rise of sociocultural map studies in the 1970s and 1980s, when a very few scholars have explicated “evolutionary” models to structure and perhaps explain the history of maps and mapping. The key figure in this respect has been Denis Wood. In studying Wood’s use of evolutionary theory, I have found myself finally understanding (I think) his understanding of the nature of “map” and therefore of “map history.”

In thinking about the analogical function of biological models in map history, and in pondering their applicability to a processual understanding of maps and mapping, I’ve therefore found myself thinking about Wood and the nature of maps and mapping. The result is a fairly long statement, one that has grown in odd ways over the months I’ve been working on it. It’s only fair that I give you a quick abstract of its sections:

Section 1, “Some Definitions and History,” is a quick and very basic review of the biological ideas about development and evolution advanced by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin, and how they were irresponsibly combined in the deeply flawed concept of “recapitulation”;

Section 2, “Ideas of Cartographic Development,” summarizes how the history of cartography has been pursued as a developmental process, even when mistakenly called “evolutionary” or “Darwinian”;

Section 3, “Denis Wood’s Recapitulationism,” is a big chunk getting to terms with Wood’s arguments that cognitive “mapping” is a developmental process whereas “maps” have indeed evolved and that the history of cartography is a process of evolution (I stress cognitive mapping, as Wood’s construal of “mapping” is quite different from my own);

Section 4, “Defining the Scope of Map Studies,’ considers the implications of developmental and evolutionary analogies in setting meaningful and logical limits to the field of map studies; and

Section 5, “Evolution and Development in a Processual Approach to Mapping and Map History,” finally gets, in a rather anticlimactic way, to the question of whether biological metaphors are at all relevant to processual map studies?

1. Some Definitions and History

Let’s start with getting the pesky terminology and its history out of the way. The following might seem obvious, and even crude in its generalizations, but please bear with me.

Both “evolution” and “development” are words with long histories that predate their modern adoption by biologists. They are still widely used in their generic meanings as a change of state in a system or process. The system might be landscape, it might be cartography, it might be both:

Justin Sorenson, composite image at head of post, “The Evolution of Cartographic Mapping” (26 January [2018]). J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.

“Development” and “Evolution” tend, in this respect, to be interchangeable. As one map maker recently wrote (in a piece to which twitter serendipitously led me as I was in the middle of the first attempt at writing this short essay):

An unfortunate side effect is that all our maps start to look the same.

…which can be great for communicating across cultures and regions and ideologies. It gets less great when we think about who gets to define mapping standards and why. Who gets to say what a map looks like? who gets to keep the gates? It also gets less great when we think about how we as humans thrive on—need—diversity and change. And less great again when we know that our development—our evolution—our ability to conceive of and perceive the world is shaped by the input we receive. By continually homogenising our view of the world we create an ever shrinking evolutionary spiral, ending up being unable to conceive of different maps. We limit our ways of describing and interpreting the world. (Steer 2020, emphasis added)

A further element of unclarity is the assumption that cognitive maps (a metaphor, only ever a metaphor) and maps are intimately or even directly related; this is a key tenet of the individualist preconception of the ideal of cartography (Edney 2019, 64–73). In the passage just quoted, it is not entirely clear whether it is individuals, humanity, or maps that are changing/developing/evolving. But then, Steer’s purpose is to blur these categories: after all, his theme is, “we map because we are maps, we are maps because we map.”

As an academic, I try to be precise in my language, or at least consistent in my terminology. (Although I can’t say that I succeed! And terminology can be slippery, and usage can shift over time even in one’s own writing.) The issue is that when modern scholars write about evolution and development, they always draw on their biological meanings, whether explicitly or implicitly. It therefore behooves us to be precise in our usage:

Evolution is the process whereby populations (of bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, etc.) change their characteristics over time.

Development is the process of change of an individual or of one thing (like landscape). In growing, maturing, and aging, individuals develop physically and cognitively, becoming more articulated and specialized. While development is necessarily directed by the individual’s complement of genes (nature), it is by no means so determined and is heavily shaped by external conditions (nurture).

1.1. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829)

That plant and animal species evolve over time was recognized in the later eighteenth century, at the same time as the Biblical chronology of a six-thousand-year-old Creation was replaced by an understanding that the earth is perhaps even billions of years old. Early in the nineteenth century, the French botanist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed a mechanism for how evolution occurs. Central to his necessarily complex model was the idea of “the inheritance of acquired characteristics”: an organism adapts in order to live in a new or changed environment, and then passes that “acquired characteristic” onto its progeny, which inherit it. Note that Lamarckian evolution requires change to happen within individual organisms.

Lamarck could not suggest a precise motive force for evolution and, in line with the era’s Romanticism and the concept of Zeitgeist as the spirit that drives an age, argued that the whole biological system is driven by the “power of life” which causes the continual creation of filaments of life.

Lamarckian concepts of evolution are what gave credence to the climatic (or more generally physical) determinism that in turn gave intellectual cover for Western nationalism and imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Early sociologists, notably Herbert Spencer, in particular sought a model to help explain the complexity of interactions within societies and saw an especially productive analogy with the biological organism. The model was productive in that modeling societies as organisms justified emergent ideas of the “nation,” as the expression of the unity of culture and society, and also seemed to explain scientific credence to the long-established religious, economic, and educational arguments that all cultures pass through predetermined stages by recasting the sequence in terms of “racial” capacities. This last application of Lamarckian models further undergirds the widely held but incorrect conviction that evolution somehow follows a guided or preordained trajectory toward some goal of perfection, driven by some motive power.

The adaptation of Lamarckian biological models to explain social function also led to what many people insist, mistakenly, in calling “Social Darwinism.” The underlying concepts of that idea were developed before Darwin ever published; it was, for example, Spencer who coined the phrase, “the survival of the fittest” in 1852.

1.2. Charles Darwin (1809–82)

Charles Darwin did not “invent” or “discover” the concept of evolution, as many people seem to believe, but proposed a novel mechanism to explain how change occurs in organisms: natural selection. His particular insight—and also Alfred Russell Wallace’s—was to shift the mechanism of evolutionary change from the individual to the population.

Recognizing that individual members of a population vary in their particular characteristics, Darwin argued in On the Origin of Species (1859)—and later in the explicit context of humanity in The Descent of Man (1871)—that as environmental conditions have changed over long periods of time, so members of a population that possess certain characteristics that are beneficial in helping them live will be more likely to survive to pass on those characteristics. Over time, those beneficial characteristics will become more pronounced in a population, perhaps ubiquitous. Natural selection is probabilistic. The principle does not imply that an individual organism that lacks a beneficial characteristic will not survive to reproduce, only that it is less likely to do so.

Darwin could offer no explanation of why variations should exist in the characteristics of individual members within a population. By the early twentieth century, biologists had identified DNA as the bearer of genetic information, and of course the post-war discovery of DNA’s double-helix form allowed for the identification of precise mechanisms of genetic change and mutation in individuals that work in ways that Darwin could never have imagined.

The biomolecular foundations of mutation and inheritance precludes the possibility that evolutionary change happens through changes within individuals. Much has been recently made of the idea that prolonged and intense biological stress can modify DNA, but such modifications seem not to persist for more than a few subsequent generations. Lamarck’s model of evolution is thoroughly discredited by biologists, together with all its implications and applications. Its analogical applications must also be discarded, if only for the seriously iniquitous practices they have sustained over the last 200 years.

Biologists have advanced and debated other population-level mechanisms that can account for the preferential selection of characteristics within a population, notably altruism, but there remains general acceptance that natural selection is the dominant process. There is also nothing in population-level evolution that can be identified as a guiding force/spirit/ethos/motive. At the same time, there is nothing that says that only beneficial characteristics can be inherited, or that characteristics are necessarily the result of natural selection. There is, by definition, huge variation within any given population, sustained by constant mutations introduced through the process of reproduction; the relationship of the individual to the overall population remains statistical, not determined.

1.3. Recapitulation

Several biologists, most famously Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), complicated matters no end by relating individual development to population evolution. At least in terms of the development of embryos, Haeckel argued that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”: the individual’s biological development (ontogeny) repeats or rehearses the same stages through which the parent population passed in its evolutionary development (phylogeny). This “recapitulation theory” relied heavily on Lamarckian principles but sought to apply them to Darwinian ideas of speciation. While refuted early (and often) within biology (Gould 1977), it has unfortunately had something of a tenacious hold in the humanities and social sciences. It seems to linger especially in cognitive development circles (follow the last link to the Wikipedia entry to see an example from 1994).

There has long been a recapitulationist edge to the ideal of cartography. Several of the ideal’s preconceptions suppose that each act of map making parallels or repeats the manner in which cartography as a whole had developed. The practice of drafting a map in manuscript before being printed, for example, is held to repeat the manner in which the manuscript reproduction of maps gave way to their print reproduction (Edney 2019, 26, 78, 93, 180). Recapitulationist suppositions have not ended with the rise of sociocultural map history. In particular, the equivalency commonly drawn between indigenous mapping in the present and preliterate mapping in the distant past (see below) has sustained a commitment to the individual’s expression of their internal, cognitive map as an external, sketch map as the “basic act of mapping—both the Ursprung of the cartographic endeavor and the impetus of each act of mapping” (Edney 2019, 71).

I am automatically leery of the use of recapitulation theory because, while it sustains what seem to be profound arguments, it allows scholars to not actually address the mechanisms involved.

2. Ideas of Cartographic Development

2.1. Unilinear and Progressive Trend of Cultural and Cartographic Development

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, even as the concept of “cartography” was formulated and increasingly accepted (Edney 2019, 114–20), the history of cartography was written in line with theories that every culture (like an individual) passes through a set sequence of developmental stages. These theories, in line with Lamarckian and Spencerian models, conflated the individual with the population, holding that social development was an expression of individual attainment. The making of maps indicated that a culture had attained a civilized state, and the nature of those maps positioned the culture on the ladder of civilization. (I address this topic in part in Edney 2020 and more thoroughly in the next book.)

Narratives of the history of cartography within Western society structured that history as a series of stages through which each map-making culture passed. The stages were rungs on a single ladder of progress leading to the modern state of cartographic perfection. Here’s a schematic diagram that I developed for my 2011 presentation to the International Conference on the History of Cartography:

The “early” cartography that traditional map historians studied comprised two lines of geographical and marine map making practices that were seemingly united by Gerhard Mercator with his famous world map of 1569, and thereafter formed a single line until the “reformation” of cartography in the eighteenth century; at that point, modern cartography featured fine-resolution territorial surveys and thematic mapping that comprised the subject matter of internal and substantive map historians (also Edney 2014).

2.2. Development Mistaken for Evolution

In their manifesto for a new, sociocultural history of cartography, Michael Blakemore and Brian Harley (1980, 17–23) called this dominant metanarrative the “Darwinian paradigm” of the history of cartography. (On their quite incorrect use of “paradigm,” see Edney 2019, 23–24). Their use of “Darwinian” was, with hindsight, quite ill-advised because they were really dealing with a developmental rather than evolutionary process: as they admitted as they began their discussion, the “basic premise” of the “Darwinian assumption” “seems to be that as civilization improves so map-making also progresses…through ‘stages of development’” (Blakemore and Harley 1980, 17).

At one point Blakemore and Harley (1980, 20) asserted that the ICA project to produce a glossary of past cartographic innovations (Wallis 1976; see Wallis and Robinson 1987) revealed “a tendency to trace back innovations through the evolutionary tree to their common ancestor (a fundamental Darwinistic assertion).” However, the ICA project was very much still in the developmental mold of a progressivist history of cartography, made no reference to evolutionary trees, nor sought to understand cartographic technologies in a branching manner.

Part of the problem, of course, is that colloquially “evolve” and “develop” seem interchangeable: Blakemore and Harley supported their terminology by citing examples of map historians using “evolve” when they should more properly have used “develop” (as Goode 1927; Brown 1949, 12). Really, what Blakemore and Harley highlighted was a progressivism that had nothing to do with evolution, let alone Darwin’s concept of natural selection. Rather, it was an understanding of development that was thoroughly implicated in the Lamarckian and thoroughly racist claims of Spencer and his ilk.

3. Denis Wood’s Recapitulationism

3.1. Development and Recapitulation

The primary work that Blakemore and Harley took to suggest the existence of an evolutionary metaphor or analogy within the study of map history was Denis Wood’s (1977) study of the history of hill signs, which he had presented to the International Conference on the History of Cartography, held that same year in Washington, D.C., and then published in the Library of Congress’s journal, Prologue (both versions are available here). Paul Harvey was prompted by Wood’s presentation and publication to structure his innovative history of topographical mapping (1980) along lines suggested by Wood’s analysis.

But, as Wood (in Dahl 1982, 73–75) quickly pointed out, his own study had been “explicitly developmental” in character, not evolutionary. Wood had been studying the ways in which children and young adults in the USA drew hills in sketch maps—in profile, obliquely, and in plan—as they developed cognitively and he made the radical comparison of these with the history of the development of landform representation in human culture as a whole. Because he was concerned with intellectual change in culture, rather than biological, Wood referred not to phylogeny but to ethnogenesis.

Wood advanced the recapitulationist argument that there existed a

striking parallel between the development…of hill-form types in [sketch maps drawn by] contemporary Americans with the development…of hill-form types in the history of mapmaking as a whole.

This parallel manifested in degrees of abstraction and genericness,

In each instance the hill form is initially a concrete picture of a hill, medially an abstraction based on the shadow-throwing property of hills, and finally an abstraction founded on the abstraction of elevation [i.e., height above a datum]. In both cases the hill form starts out as a generic hill, as any hill and as all hills, becomes differentiated into types of hills—isolated, rolling, foothills, mountains—and ends up capable of representing uniquely any instance of whatever character or magnitude of relief. In the beginning in both cases the hill is represented as seen from the egocentric perspective of the typical human, frontally, in elevation [i.e., profile]; later it is represented as seen from the perspective of a bird’s eye, and finally is shown as seen directly overhead, as if from an airplane. (Wood 1977, 158)

Wood relied on a graphic argument to validate his recapitulation, displaying ontology and ethnogenesis in two graphs. First, a graph of the ethnogenesis of hill signs, in which the vertical axis (to be read from top to bottom) marked the cultural development of hill signs, from profile to oblique to plan, the horizontal axis showing time:

Wood (1977, 154): “The ethnogenesis of hill signs”

Second, a graph of the ontogenesis of hill signs, in which the vertical axis indicated kinds of hill signs, again sequenced from profile to oblique to plan, and the horizontal axis age of the test subjects. (For non-US readers: add 5 or 6 to the grade to get the child’s age; e.g., 12th grade is age 17–18 years.) The cells in this matrix indicate the number of times (as a percentage of occurrences) a particular school sign was used by test subjects in each age group:

Wood (1977, 159): “The ontogenesis of hill signs.”

Significantly, Wood diverged from the unilinear trend of cultural development by arguing that each category of hill sign was not displaced by successive categories, but rather that they continued in use and coexisted with later categories. Thus, in Wood’s ontogenetic figure, the test subjects who were graduate students used profile, oblique, and planar signs to represent hills and single subjects used different forms of hill sign on the same sketch map. (At least, that’s how I read the values provided in this figure.)

Importantly, Wood provided a mechanism for this recapitulation, specifically, education and training in map making. As new map making techniques are developed and as map making becomes progressively more sophisticated (ethnogenesis), so education and training disciplines the individual cognitively so that more sophisticated techniques are progressively adopted with continued exposure to education (ontogeny). The mechanism was feasible and, by explicating it, Wood avoided any unwarranted Lamarckian inferences.

Unfortunately, when Paul Harvey adapted Wood’s categorization to structure his history of topographical mapping in three parts, each addressing a kind of topographical representation—symbolic, pictorial, and surveyed—he also reintroduced presumptions of unilinear development:

It is an odd (though explicable) fact that some of the oldest maps to be discussed…are among the most advanced, belonging to the third phase of development [surveyed], while most of those discussed from the first, primitive, phase are relatively recent. (Harvey 1980, 26)

Harvey’s use of “advanced” and “primitive” indicate that he was still working in, or at least influenced by, the traditional narrative of maps as markers of location on the ladder of progress and civilization.

Much of Harvey’s difficulty lay in the selection of signs Wood deployed in his neat and seemingly authoritative ethnogenetic graph. The appearance of different kinds of hill signs was never so precise; if one fitted error bars to Wood’s ethnogenetic graph, they would completely overwhelm the trendline. Moreover, dating the early meso-American hill signs to 4,000 BCE is wildly inaccurate and seems only to justify the preconceived notion that profile signs must precede oblique signs must precede planar signs. Certainly, the graph of the ethnogenesis of hill signs collapses all cultures into a single line of development. Sound familiar?

Indeed, by giving such early dates to the meso-American hill signs, Wood rehearsed the circular argument implicit in models of linear cultural development, that all early/primitive cultures are the same, regardless of when they existed, so that a contemporary or recent early culture stands in for early stages in the past of cultures that have attained higher degrees of civilization (but that lack evidence of those early stages), requiring early cultural forms from complex cultures to be dated early. Wood’s model of ethnogenesis is fundamentally flawed; without it, his recapitulationist argument collapses.

3.2. “Mapping” Develops

Wood expanded on the developmental model of mapping in later work, but in doing so kept the focus of analysis to particular cultures (Wood 1992a; Wood 1992b, 28–47; Wood 1993). His basic argument was that maps themselves do not develop in a biological sense, beyond the process of their production in which a map might be steadily elaborated and articulated over time. He used the example of J. R. R. Tolkien’s creation of the map of Middle Earth that “grew” over several years as Tolkien added more sheets to manage his ever-expanding creation (see McIlwaine 2018).

What does develop, Wood observed, is an individual’s physical and cognitive abilities to experience and understand the world in which they live and then to express that understanding in some manner. For Wood, this individualistic process of cognition is “mapping.” It is a much more restricted understanding of that term than I use, which is why the word is in scare quotes in the heading to this short section.

As an individual’s capacity for mapping develops, so does their ability and propensity for making maps, an ability and propensity shaped by their education and training. In this last respect, Wood identified the economic nature of a society as the key determinant of how people develop as map makers, whether they live “map immersed” in modern industrial societies, constantly surrounded by examples of how maps should look, or in much less articulated and specialized societies with far fewer occasions for map use and therefore map education.

3.3. The Evolution of “Maps”?

But if maps don’t develop, Wood (1994) argued, they do evolve. Wood made this argument in an essay review of two of Paul Harvey’s later works on medieval maps (Skelton and Harvey 1986; Harvey 1991). Wood argued that in those works, as in his 1980 history of topographical mapping, Harvey had pursued an essentially evolutionary form of thinking:

Because Harvey saw maps evolving from maplike antecedents, rather than simply getting better or worse with time, what he chose to regard as maps continuously evolved as well. Harvey was explicit about this: “As the reader may or may not have noticed—we have silently adjusted our idea of what is and what is not a map as we have moved to different cultures and different ages” [Harvey 1980, 101]. This disturbed some reviewers, but since it is apodictic that maps as we know them today did not spring full-born from the brow of early humans (any more than the car, the comic book, or the skyscraper), their antecedents doubtless were maplike rather than just more or less accurate versions of what we call maps today. It follows from this that the further back in time the origins of maps are sought, the less and less likely it is they should resemble the maps we know today (the less and less likely it is they were the maps we know today). This is thinking about evolution the way biologists do. Harvey's construction of the history of maps from maplike antecedents is like the story we tell about human evolution, which is less one of humans changing from one form to another (so called vertical change), than of human speciation from antecedent prehuman forms (from some ancestor common to us and the contemporary great apes, from some earlier mammalian predecessor, from…single-celled protozoa). (Wood 1994, 52)

For Wood, the history of cartography—or, rather, the history of maps—should be understood as being implicitly evolutionary. He provided a useful set of diagrams modeled on evolutionary tree diagrams to show the different approaches:

Wood (1994, 55): “Schematic representation of four models of the history of cartography”

From the left: the progressivist sequence of unilinear development; Wood’s own 1977 model of hill signs (which he now understood as having been limited); Harvey’s 1980 understanding of the history of topographical maps; and (at right) Wood’s extrapolation based on the evidence of Harvey’s later works of a model that is more akin to a biological model in which there is “diversification” of forms but also their periodic “decimation” (Wood 1994, 55, quoting Gould 1989, 46–47).

It is crucial to Wood’s argument that maps today are not the same as maps in the past, in the same way that homo sapiens are not the same as other Hominini (chimpanzees or australopithicus) or other Hominidae (like orangutans and gorillas) or other mammals. Wood thus rejected the definition of “map” advanced in the first volume of The History of Cartography—that maps are “graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world” (Harley and Woodard 1987, xvi)—for being so generic as to be over-reaching. One might as well include cats in a study of humans!

Wood uses Harvey’s evidence, and that also offered by Richard Talbert (1991) for the Roman world and by certain essays in David Buisseret’s (1992) volume on mapping in the early modern state, to argue that “the map” is a creation specifically of the Renaissance, the modern state, and of capitalism. Before then, before the development of an appreciation for the idea of “the map,” there were only sporadic and specific occasions in which something maplike would be made to fill a particular need, as a one-off work, and not as part of a concerted and self-aware endeavor of cartography. That is, for Wood, “maps” are strictly modern, surveyed images; cartography is the modern endeavor. In studying the evolutionary precursors of “the map,” one must clearly distinguish them as precursors to and not as the same species or even genus as “the map.”

There are several problems with Wood’s evolutionary model. To begin with, on a relatively minor point, his preferred (rightmost) diagram fails to capture, to my mind, the manner in which some older map forms persist even as others died out. A better kind of image is the kind of genetic tree offered more recently by evolutionary biologists, such as this one of the Homininae:

“Model of the phylogeny of Hominini over the past 10 million years.” Vertical axis: millions of years BP. Source: wikidata.org

4. Defining the Scope of Map Studies

4.1. Wood’s Absolute Delineation

There is a key implication for Wood’s strict position, which became clear in his review of Jordana Dym and Karl Offen’s Mapping Latin America (2011). Taking exception to the breadth of images discussed by contributors to that volume as a marker of the influence of Harley and Woodward, Wood let rip at the very conception of the edited volume:

Harley and Woodward’s reactionary definition was ridiculously capacious, failing to distinguish a map—with its singular logic—from almost any other graphic—with their individual [different] logics—drawings, paintings, photos, diagrams, graphs; failing to distinguish a map from, say, one of William Playfair’s statistical graphs, from a watercolour by J. M. W. Turner (say, his Upper Falls of the Reichenbach), from one of those oil sketches by Willem de Kooning (Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louse Point), from one of Richard Misrach’s luminous ocean photographs, from a satellite photograph, or from one of Richard Diebenkorn’s paintings of Ocean Park.

This is throwing away the map to save it, ignoring its peculiar power to demonstrate its pervasiveness. It begs the very question, If it’s just a graphic text that can be analysed to reveal something about space, why then, in this book, so narrow a focus on so particular a subset as…the map? Why not a Latin American equivalent of Kivelson and Neuberger’s Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture? (Wood 2012, 137)

The issue is profound and at one time certainly troubled me. How does one legitimately delimit the field of map studies or, in my particular case, the field of map history if “map” is up in the air?

An adherent of Harley and Woodward’s definition, as I once was, faces a quandary: even as one pursues new and interesting studies, as per Harley and Woodward, one continues to define the limit of those studies—the limit of one’s field of study—by unacknowledged and unexamined concepts about “maps” and one runs the profound risk of simply perpetuating the long-established, narrow and restrictive range of things that were once privileged as maps. How does one delimit—de-fine—the field in an intellectually appropriate manner?

Wood’s solution is to insist on cartography’s ontological preconception, that what characterizes all maps, if they are to be maps, is the “singular logic” of their signification of location. Anything else is just another kind of graphic. By this standard, verbal maps are not maps. (They’re part of the cognitive mapping process, although expressed through the semiotic medium of language…but they do inform about location, perhaps through relative cues rather than the absolute system that Wood wants for locational signification.)

4.2. Prototype Theory

Another solution is to use the prototype theory advanced by some linguists (esp. Lakoff 1987) to define “maps,” as has been done by some map scholars (Vasiliev et al. 1990; MacEachren 1995). This model suggests that there is a “prototype” conception that defines a noun, around which is a field of acceptable noun-ness. So, there’s some concept “map” against which one can compare an image, and if the image is “close enough” and falls within some threshold of map-ness, then it’s a map. If not, it’s not a map. Vasiliev et al. (1990) sought to clarify the elements that together constitute the prototype, although to my mind they only ended up reifying the modern idealization of the normative map: their test subjects identified map-ness according to how they had been taught to think of maps.

I’m not sure if Lakoff’s prototype theory is still widely accepted among academic cartographers. But the theory does seem to model how sociocultural map scholars have intuitively modeled their understanding of “map” and “cartography” since the 1980s. That is, as they reject the normative restrictions placed on maps, they have effectively expanded the map/not-a-map threshold so that an ever greater conceptual region is included, yet still without wondering too much about the prototype. (I referred above to Wood’s definition of map as being absolute because it effectively constructs a threshold that is coincident with his prototype.)

This is also a situation facing other arenas of scholarship. Art history, in particular, has a long history of struggling to define “art” and therefore the field of “art history.” Art historians have wondered, for example, whether it makes sense to use the conception of “art” developed in the eighteenth century for all of human history (Shiner 2001). They have realized that the vast majority of images made in human history are informational in nature (including maps), so that “visual expressiveness, eloquence, and complexity are not the proprietary traits of fine art,” so what then becomes of art history (Elkins 1995, 553)? Indeed, in looking at the original emergence of “art” as the practice of making meaningful marks, an archaeologist understands art to have emerged from visual communication generally, in the second communication revolution within human evolution (after speech but before writing: Davidson 2020). In all these cases, disciplinary definitions are steadily expanded. I don’t know enough about art history to know if philosophical delimitations have expanded so far as to reach a breaking point, but they have for cartography.

4.3. Map Studies are Delimited by Mapping Processes, not Maps

When I still thought that “cartography” was a valid conception, rather than an idealization, like Wood I had a hard time with the idea of leaving such a fundamental point unexamined as the nature of maps. Cartography is defined as “map making,” so what is cartography if the prototypical map is uncertain? Harley and Woodward (1987) proposed an amorphous prototype; Woodward and Lewis (1998) made the prototype still more ineffable by including ephemeral forms of maps. What then is cartography? What would be included in a history of cartography, what not? Logically, one can be either catholic in one’s understanding, in which case one must own up to really engaging in “visual culture,” or one adopts a clear and unambiguous definition of map and delimit one’s studies accordingly. Wood is thus hostile towards scholars like Dym and Offen who he thinks want to have it both ways.

What I have realized, as I continue to wrap my head around the fact that “map” and “cartography” are idealizations, is that this philosophical problem of ring-fencing and definition is not actually a problem. At least, it is only a problem when couched in terms of cartography, in terms of some big universal endeavor, and of map, as a graphic characterized by a particular, singular logic. Neither conception is historically valid. In getting past the hegemonic mindset of “cartography,” it is necessary instead to think in terms of mapping, as the (any) process of “representing spatial complexity,” and of map as any semiotic text “representing spatial complexity” (Edney 2019, 41). Maps are the epiphenomena of the processes by which spatial complexity is comprehended and communicated and utilized. In this respect, I see multiple kinds of maps made in different ways (not only graphic) to different ends and for different communities.

Only by conceptualizing the subject as broadly as possible, far more broadly than Harley and Woodward (1987) and as broadly as Woodward and Lewis (1998), is it possible to get beyond all the pesky problems that happen when one draws a boundary around a subject. Wood (with John Fels) distinguishes between map; perimap, which is to say all the material on the same surface as the map but lacking its propositional logic of denoting location; and epimap, which is to say all other the images and objects that conceptually surround the map and give it context. Perimap and epimap together constitute the paramap (Wood and Fels 2008, 8–12). The problem is that it is difficult (if not impossible) to establish the signification of a map (so defined) distinct from the perimap; the signification of maps bleed off the edge of the paper and into the surrounding book and into other semiotic texts. The boundaries, seemingly neat and orderly, dissolve.

Such uncertainty arises every time we construct a boundary around any intellectual construct. What is a work of art? (I appreciate Davidson 2020’s comparison of a mural by Banksy and a structurally similar advertisement; the former ceased being mere property-damaging graffiti and became art once Banksy was accepted as a creative genius, the latter will never be considered as art because of its overtly commercial and consciously designed nature.) What is a book? What is the discipline of geography, or history, or physics? What is literature? What is a university? What is a language? What is literacy? What is the USA (Immerwahr 2019)? And so on, and so on, ad nauseam.

So, three options:

1) We can throw up our hands in disgust, and resort to the intuitive, prototype-theoretical practice, say, “I don’t know what X is, but I know it when I see it,” and then trust in our abilities to be as inclusive and as critical as possible.

2) Or, we can construct precise definitions and then engage in lengthy battles to preserve the intellectual field we have thereby created, as Wood.

3) Or, and this is the fundamental point of so much intellectual work about “social construction,” we accept that everything is messy because people behave in messy ways, and through their communal behavior constitute society itself.

I recommend option 3. It is not enough to say that things are socially (politically|ideologically) defined, as if society somehow exists to shape and define things. Rather, it is by doing things, from living in and communicating about the world, in expressing ourselves through graphic imagery (and through words, and in sculpture, or video), that societies and cultures are made (Latour 2005).

Everything is a process.

Art is a process, or should it be “artification” to prevent the confusion offered by “art” as a thing (Shapiro 2019). (Maybe “arting”?)

Mapping is a process, a process of communicating and learning about the world, of producing, circulating, and consuming maps that inform about the world and its nature. Not only to locate things, although much mapping has that task, but to develop organizational schemas that are shared within particular communities.

So, yes, mapping is a social practice, maps are social constructions. That does not mean—just to head of the usual, tiresome criticism—that there is no objective truth and that everything is subjective. Such critique is, to me, an especially willful misunderstanding of such “constructivism.” The social construction of science does not deny that there are fundamental truths about the world (2+2=4; e=mc2) but that the entire apparatus of science is done by and for particular groups of humans, and that communally defined conventions govern scientific work, not just personal genius or insight. I, too, want maps to show me how to get from where I am to some other place I want to be, but I am not going to insist that because some things that are manifestly maps serve a navigational function, that all maps should have a navigational and factual essence. There are a multitude of maps, created and used within a multitude of communal contexts—not individual contexts—and the combination and overlapping of those precise contexts (call them spatial discourses) is what constitutes society as a whole, with all its social inequalities and power dynamics.

I could go on at length, as I have before now (Edney 2019, chap. 2). And I will do so again, I am sure. But for now, let’s get back to the implications of all this for considering the nature of historical change in mapping and whether “development” and “evolution” are appropriate concepts.

5. Evolution and Development in a Processual Approach to Mapping and Map History

The terms “develop” and “evolution” with their biological connotations have different meanings and implications according to the different understandings of mapping.

From a normative perspective, traditional map historians have long argued that cartography develops in line with each culture: map making begins simple then gets ever more complex and sophisticated over time. It is, in fact, one of the key elements contributing to the normative concept of maps: if map making did not develop over time, then it is not really map making! (And only Western map making has developed over time, so only Western maps are really maps.)

If we discard the normative perspective, as scholars have tried to do since 1980 or so, then different options present themselves:

From an absolutist and cognitive frame of reference, à la Wood, then we can say that maps evolve and moreover that they speciate, producing markedly different kinds of maps for different purposes, all of which nonetheless share a common mapness, and that the individual’s capacity for mapping (as a cognitive act) develops along with physical and cognitive capacity.

From a relativistic and sociocultural frame of reference, à la Dym and Offen (and most other sociocultural map scholars), then … well, the terms develop and evolve are not banded about often, in large part because sociocultural map historians are not really interested in diachronic analysis. Sociocultural map studies tend to focus on particular maps in particular contexts and are overwhelmingly synchronic in their agendas.

But from a processual perspective, can we use develop and evolve in a meaningful way? That is, are their unavoidable and inevitable biological connotations permissible or do they entail incorrect or misleading assumptions?

The key to a processual map history is that mapping is undertaken within precise spatial discourses. The community of individuals who participate in a specific discourse—who produce, circulate, and consume texts in order to communicate and comprehend a very particular understanding of the world—can certainly change their practices, their conventions, and their constitution. In the case of the mapping of the urban place called Portland, Maine, for example, a very specific set of representational strategies emerged early in the nineteenth century that were later altered through the incorporation of nationalized engineering conventions and a broadening of the community involved to encompass trained engineers and commercial cartographers as far away as Philadelphia (Edney 2017). It is plain that this precise spatial discourse changed over time and indeed that it spawned new spatial discourses: the city map in the city directory persisted, but the mapping of the city as wall displays constituted a new discourse overlapping with the first yet nonetheless distinct in its participants and processes. Within a spatial discourse, I do not see the kind of increased articulation and specialization that merits an analogy with development.

As for evolution, that is perhaps a different manner. When I began this essay, I was thinking that change over time in mapping is not analogous to evolution. After all, what is the mechanism of selection? But as I’m writing this, I’m thinking about not only the small community in Portland that produced and consumed city maps in city directories, but also the fact that there were similar communities in other antebellum US cities (Boston, New York, Hartford, etc.). Can we think of this collection of spatial discourses, which I have tended to think as each unique unto itself, as actually comprising a population of spatial discourses that undergoes stress and variable selection? Even so, at this point, I’m still at a loss to identify the manner in which a population of spatial discourses reproduces itself. (What would the mapping equivalent be to “The Birds and the Bees”?)

The mechanisms of change in mapping occur within individual discourses. Each spatial discourse will change over time; my sense is that change is inevitable, but there is a potential for constancy that I can’t rule out yet. New spatial discourses emerge, undoubtedly others are disbanded. But they are not organisms. They don’t grow in size, gobbling up other discourses to survive. They don’t start simple, mature, and then decline into senescence. So, no, mapping does not evolve, nor does it develop.

All this is to say: analogies of development and, to some degree, evolution have undergirded the history of cartography, both normative and sociocultural. The analogies contribute to the persistent myth of “cartography.” They are among the many conceptual habits that map scholars must discard as a field if we are ever to get out of the rut of cartography.

tl;dr – no one should use “develop” or “evolve” in their map historical studies in any way that might be interpreted as analogous to biological processes.

References

Andrews, J. H. 2007. “Reflections on the Harley-Woodward Definition of ‘Maps.’” Irish Geography 40, no. 2: 200–5.

Blakemore, Michael J., and J. B. Harley. 1980. “Concepts in the History of Cartography: A Review and Perspective.” Cartographica 17, no. 4: Monograph 26.

Brown, Lloyd A. 1949. The Story of Maps. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

Buisseret, David, ed. 1992. Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dahl, Edward H., ed. 1982. “Concepts in the History of Cartography: Some Responses, with the Authors’ Reply, Especially to Questions of Definition.” Cartographica 19, no. 1: 66–96.

Davidson, Iain. 2020. “Marks, Pictures and Art: Their Contribution to Revolutions in Communication.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 27, no. 3: 745–70.

Dym, Jordana, and Karl Offen, eds. 2011. Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Edney, Matthew H. 2014. “A Content Analysis of Imago Mundi, 1935–2010.” Imago Mundi 66 supplement: 107–31.

———. 2017. “References to the Fore! Local and National Mapping Traditions in the Printed Maps of Antebellum Portland, Maine.” Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine.

———. 2019. Cartography: The Ideal and Its History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2020. “Creating ‘Discovery’: The Myth of Columbus, 1777–1828.” Terrae Incognitae 52, no. 2: 195–213.

Elkins, James. 1995. “Art History and Images that Are Not Art.” Art Bulletin 77, no. 4: 553–71.

Goode, J. Paul. 1927. “The Map as a Record of Progress in Geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 17, no. 1: 1–14.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1977. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

———. 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York: Norton.

Harley, J. B., and David Woodward. 1987. “Preface.” In Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, edited by J. B. Harley, and David Woodward, xv–xxi. Vol. 1 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Harvey, P. D. A. 1980. The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys. London: Thames and Hudson.

———. 1991. Medieval Maps. London: British Library.

Immerwahr, Daniel. 2019. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.

Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

MacEachren, Alan M. 1995. How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design. New York: Guilford Press.

McIlwaine, Catherine. 2018. Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth. Oxford: Bodleian Library.

Shapiro, Roberta. 2019. “Artification as Process.” Cultural Sociology 13, no. 3: 265–75.

Shiner, Larry. 2001. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Skelton, R. A., and P. D. A. Harvey, eds. 1986. Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Steer, Adam. 2020. “The Maps We Are, the Maps We Make.” Spatialised. 2 August 2020.

Talbert, Richard A. 1991. Rome’s Empire and Beyond: The Spatial Aspect. Cahiers des études anciennes 26: 216–17.

Tufte, Edward R. 1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press.

Vasiliev, I., S. Freundschuh, D. M. Mark, G. D. Theisen, and J. McAvoy. 1990. “What is a Map?” Cartographic Journal 27, no. 2: 119–23.

Wallis, Helen M., ed. 1976. Map-Making to 1900: An Historical Glossary of Cartographic Innovations and Their Diffusion. London: Royal Society for the International Cartographic Association.

Wallis, Helen M., and Arthur H. Robinson, eds. 1987. Cartographical Innovations: An International Handbook of Mapping Terms to 1900. London: Map Collector Publications for the International Cartographic Association.

Wieder, F. C. 1925–1933. Monumenta cartographica: Reproductions of Unique and Rare Maps, Plans and Views in the Actual Size of the Originals; Accompanied by Cartographical Monographs. 5 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Wood, Denis. 1977. “Now and Then: Comparisons of Ordinary Americans’ Symbol Conventions with Those of Past Cartographers.” Prologue 9: 151–61.

———. 1992a. “How Maps Work.” Cartographica 29, no. 3 & 4: 66–74.

———. 1992b. The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press.

———. 1993. “The Fine Line between Mapping and Mapmaking.” Cartographica 30, no. 4: 50–60.

———. 1994. “P. D. A. Harvey and Medieval Mapmaking: An Essay Review.” Cartographica 31, no. 3: 52–59.

———. 2012. Review of Jordana Dym and Karl Offen, eds., Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Cartographica 47, no. 2: 136–38.

Wood, Denis, and John Fels. 2008. The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Woodward, David, and G. Malcolm Lewis. 1998. “Introduction.” In Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacifie Societies, edited by David Woodward, and G. Malcolm Lewis, 1–10. Vol. 2.3 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mapping as Process

Mapping as Process

Mapping as Process

Mapping as Process

Rethinking Maps and Mapping and How They Have Developed and Evolved

A fairly simple enquiry — how relevant is it to talk about the development and evolution of maps and mapping? — soon gets wrapped up in questions about the nature of “maps” and “mapping” and therefore how we define maps, cartography, map history, and map studies generally.

1. Some Definitions and History

1.1. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829)

1.2. Charles Darwin (1809–82)

1.3. Recapitulation

2. Ideas of Cartographic Development

2.1. Unilinear and Progressive Trend of Cultural and Cartographic Development

2.2. Development Mistaken for Evolution

3. Denis Wood’s Recapitulationism

3.1. Development and Recapitulation

3.2. “Mapping” Develops

3.3. The Evolution of “Maps”?

4. Defining the Scope of Map Studies

4.1. Wood’s Absolute Delineation

4.2. Prototype Theory

4.3. Map Studies are Delimited by Mapping Processes, not Maps

5. Evolution and Development in a Processual Approach to Mapping and Map History

References

Mapping as Process

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