Maps, Humor, and the Absurd
/I ran, last January, into a great example of the insistence that maps, and therefore map-related images, must be factually correct.
Background
One of my favorite websites is XKCD, by Randall Munroe, which he calls “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Munroe has wide-ranging, science-nerdy interests and is always funny, in a generally absurdist manner. XKCD would be one of my favorite websites, even if many of his comics were not about maps in some way. But they are, and I cite a couple of the comics in Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, including (p. 32) the particular subject of this post.
XKCD is so popular that it has spawned a community-driven wiki, Explain XKCD. As the name suggests, the wiki is dedicated to explaining each and every one of Munroe’s comics. The masthead explains that, as of 25 April 2020, “We have an explanation for all 2299 kcd comics, and only 28 (1%) are incomplete. Help us finish them!” I learned of this wiki back in January, from a discussion on Language Log about a (then) recent XKCD comic. Somewhat gob-smacked by the existence of the Wiki (because my old school nerdiness likes things in hard copy and the further flung elements of out digital existence remain obscure to me) and I told my brother about it because he too is a fan of XKCD, But he already knew of the wiki and promptly pointed me to the still-incomplete explanation that concerns a map-related comic, XKCD 1688 “Guide to Figuring Out the Age of a Undated World Map (assuming it’s complete, labeled in English, and detailed enough)”:
Randall Munroe’s guide to map dating (XKCD 1688). Click on the image to goto the original site.
If you’ve not seen the comic, go ahead, spend some time with it, have some fun! And if you don’t know the comic, explore the archives. (There’s something that will take a good hour or so should time hang heavy on your hands!) And, then, support Munroe by buying his excellent books!
The Comic: Map Dating
The comic’s premise appears straightforward: how can one date an undated map from its content? This is a procedure often followed by map historians and librarians when presented with an undated map. Every map scholar has developed a small repertoire of features that have changed in particular regions at known dates. The shape and internal divisions of Germany, for example, is a great way to distinguish between maps made pre-1919, in 1919–45, 1945–90, and post-1990. Of course, such practices are not perfect, as old features often linger on maps through the simple inertia of copying, but with enough features in play and with some sense of the nature of the map, the map can be dated, at least broadly. It’s an art, not a science.
The flow chart starts, at top center, with a question that is really useful, in my own experience, in helping to date maps: how is the great city on the Bospherus named? Is it Constantinople, Istanbul, or neither? And the logic begins to unfurl straightforwardly from there, along what the Explain XKCD entry defines as the Constantinople, Istanbul, and Neither divisions.
The temptation to try out the flow chart is strong. I began with a 1662 map, but that rapidly ran aground on the comic’s comment that, before 1805, “the modern idea of a complete political map of the world gets hard to apply” so 1805 serves as a terminus post quod for the guide itself. My next test was on this map (whose toponyms I’ve translated into English):
Victoires et Conquetes de la Religion Catholique = Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Educaiton (50275). Click on map to see in more detail.
Following the steps,
1. Constantinople
2. Canada is shown as British America, Alaska as Russian; and Tokyo is still called Jedo.
3. No Holy Roman Empire, rather German Confederation
4. yes, United States
5. Texas is part of Mexico
6. Florida is part of the USA
7. Neither Venezuela nor Ecuador
gives a dating of 1819–29. Which, alas, is wrong. The map is from an encyclopedia published in about 1865; because the map is an analytical map showing the “victories and conquests” of Catholicism, it’s using an older map, pre-Alamo (1836).
The Comic: Decision Trees
But the comic is not just about dating maps. It is also about decision trees and flow charts, another one of Munroe’s favorite topics. These are the kinds of logic diagrams that computer programmers would use when designing a program in those distant days of unstructured languages such as Basic (ugh) and Fortran IV (my first computer language). And they’ve been widely mocked and emulated ever since, even though they are no longer commonly used by software engineers:
A “meaningful” flow chart. c/o PhDcomics.com
or, particularly appropriate for me,
“Buying another book,” a flow chart that is proudly displayed on my office door
Some of the tests in Munroe’s flow chart are themselves absurdist, such as, in the far lower right corner, “(Number of Yemens) + (Number of Germanys) = ?” A legitimate way of helping determine a date, sure, but not one that would occur to most map scholars, I think. Also, several of the tests address geographical features that are so precise (the name of a town between Albuquerque and El Paso [green in the image below]; Jan Mayen, a tiny island north of Iceland) that they would never be visible on most world maps. And there’s a test that hinges on a momentary event that would not normally be shown on maps, the time when US President Jimmy Carter was “attacked” (not really) by a swimming rabbit on 20 April 1979, which of course parodies the selection of other historical events that are commemorated by being placed on maps.
Moreover, the structure of the flow chart is itself led into absurdity. I’ve marked the areas in the following graphic where it extends into maps of non-real, fictional worlds (in red) and then into a broad area of non-maps such as cats and seagulls (blue). (A key question for the fictional worlds is whether they mention Cair Paravel, which Munroe also added to his very clever A British Map labeled by an American, at about Ipswich, or was this intended to be Colchester, ancient site of a large Roman fortified town? Hmmm, this too is also labeled as “incomplete” in Explain XKCD.)
There is also a small section (purple) of the flow chart that purports to date maps into the future. Is Colorado marked “Danger: radioactive exclusion zone, avoid” with the further test, “Does the warning mention the spiders?”: no (2022), yes (2023 or later).
Areas of absurdity in Munroe’s flow chart: red, maps of fictional worlds; blue, non-maps, such as cats and seagulls; green, details about I-25 before I-25 was built; and, purple, the future.
Overall, Munroe takes a basic principle of map historical practice, although as an educated amateur, turns it into a common logic device, and then in true XKCD fashion twists it into absurdity. Which pleased me, when I first saw the comic, because traditional map history has long had a way of blending into the absurd.
Literality in Explaining the Comic
What got me about Explain XKCD’s commentary about XKCD 1688 is the wiksters’ communal insistence on literality. (Wiktioneers? Wikographers? Wikipedia itself is clear that contributors to that wiki are “wikipedians,” but its generic entry on Wiki is silent on the matter.)
The key quote from Explanation XKCD is this, with my added emphasis:
The flowchart, although probably effective in eventually identifying the production year of certain maps, is designed in a rather inefficient way, as some early distinctions are already on a very detailed level before some really important distinctions (fictional or non-political map) are made. This, of course, adds to the humorous tone of the comic. It is also hampered by several smaller or larger error[s] (see trivia), the biggest being a whole section on I-25 that gives years in the range 1948–1952, before I-25 was built, and coming from a question that fixed the year range to 1960–1961.
I see the comic as another of Munroe’s contributions to the tradition of satirizing “the map,” a tradition that goes back to Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll in the later nineteenth century. He includes within the flow chart maps of fictitious worlds (notably Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Lewis’s Narnia, but also Pratchett’s Discworld), precisely the kinds of maps that challenge the old insistence that maps must properly be of the earth’s surface and that promote the understanding that mapping is defined by the process or strategy not the subject matter. On the other hand, this kind of academic debate is perhaps alien to the wider community of readers of genre fiction, for whom the maps in works of fantasy must be as correct and as truthful as maps of the real world. (On which, see Jonathan Crowe’s Fantasy Maps Don’t Belong in the Hands of Fantasy Characters [Tor, 28 May 2019].)
In that respect, the inclusion of the “Fictional Map / Non-Map Subbranch” within the flow chart, as it is called in the Explain XKCD entry, presents no problems for a literal reading. The long table in explanation of the flow chart introduces the Narnia Subbranch with an attempt at chronological clarification:
Note: This series contains seven books, whose original publication order does not match their chronological order. Specifically, The Magician’s Nephew is earlier than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and The Horse and His Boy is between The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. Questions in this subbranch concern whether the place referenced can be found in the map contained in each book, not in which books’ time the place exists. Therefore, places that exist in a book published later but is chronologically earlier than another book will not appear in the latter book, even if canonically they still exist in its time.
The administrative note at the head of the entry makes explicit the desire for a working and functional guide to map dating, albeit one that would somehow retain its humor.
the wiki admin’s explanation of why the entry remains incomplete
Indeed, there’s a wishful note at the end of the explanation, in the short trivia section (now much shorter than it was in January): “it appears Randall has been fixing these errors” of date ranges. If he is fixing these changes, they are not apparent to me; certainly the errors (such as the failure to include 1857) remain the same. (And the page seems not to have been updated since November 2017.)
How to make sense of all this? I think there are two conclusions that might be drawn.
On the one hand, this whole entry, with its failure to note the humor in the structure of the flow chart, is an instance of the hyper-nitpickiness of which science nerds are so often accused for humorous effect. But that seems just too stereotypical to me (too “comic book guy” in the Simpsons, too “Sheldon” in Big Bang Theory).
On the other, the wiksters’ desire for literality speaks strongly to the modern desire for maps—and even for maps of maps, such as Munroe’s comic—to be “true” and faithful to what they depict. Of course, explaining humor is the quickest way to make something unfunny, and no doubt accounts for the emphasis on geographical and chronological facts. Yet the desire to make the flow chart work goes over and above simple explanation: the mismatch between the map of maps and the maps themselves must be fixed and made correct. And so the normative conception of map is reiterated, leaving no room for humor or the absurd.
