“Mode” or “Genre”?

How to subdivide the different kinds of maps … or, more properly, mapping

When faced with different kinds of maps, some good friends and colleagues like to talk about the different “genres” of maps. I, on the other hand, advocate “mode.” My friends and colleagues insist to me that genre is adequate and why introduce another term? I think it’s time to explain how I see the difference between the two. Specifically, “genre” refers to the form of things (style, character, etc.) whereas “mode” refers to the process (the way or manner) by which a thing occurs. “Genre” and “mode” are both useful concepts for map scholars, the study of “genre” centering inquiry on map form, “mode” on mapping processes.

Genres of Maps

There is no need to dig deeply into the theories proposed by numerous scholars of the constitution, delimitation, and ideological functioning of “genre.” In general, “genre” refers to a “kind” or “style” of a thing. Students of culture are especially concerned with defining the rules and structures that underpin literary, artistic, and filmic genres. Literary studies still feature efforts to set off serious/real “literature” per se from lesser “genre works” (fantasy, science fiction, romance, detective/mystery, thriller, cooking, young adult, graphic, etc.).

My favorite explanation of “genre” was provided by the fantasy author Neil Gaiman in a (very funny) 2015 lecture at MIT. Gaiman argued that, from an artistic or literary point of view, genre entails “predictability within certain constraints; it is not subject matter, nor tone.” For Gaiman, genre is defined by the features without which a reader would feel cheated: “you go to a musical and no one sings, what kind of musical is that?” Further, what makes a film or play a “musical” is not just the fact that it contains music—most Hollywood films today are saturated in incidental and background music—but that the structure and components of the plot are supported by songs, by their lyrics, and by their performance by actors.

(For an alternative take on “genre”—as amusing as Gaiman’s if you know the auteur’s oeuvre—see the take by “Honest Trailers” on every film by Wes Anderson, pre-Isle of Dogs [2018].)

Map historians have traditionally been inconsistent in their recognition of genres of maps. Some have intuitively recognized that maps fall into different genres, according to the manner in which they depict the world, or the kind of features in the world that they map. For example, Alan Hodgkiss (1981) organized his history of cartography, Understanding Maps, around the differences between world maps, regional maps, marine maps, route maps, urban maps and views, thematic maps, official topographical mapping, and modern commercial mapping. An alternative common classification of map genres is by numerical scale (large-scale vs medium-scale vs small-scale). Map genres also seem to be hierarchically subdivided: analytical maps of the distributions of environmental natural and social data can, for example, be further classified by the kind of data they depict (geological maps, demographic maps), or the functions they fulfil (nuclear evacuation routes, no-fly zones). “Map” is thus a genre in and of itself, and also a hierarchical family of genres (Lois 2015).

In practice, map historians seem to talk about “genres” when they make distinctions between maps within a given corpus: these maps look different from those. In this respect, the delineation of genres is constrained by the archive: if the archive grows, one might have to change the classification of genres. In this respect, genre does not help us explain past mapping processes.

The problem in delineating map genres lies in establishing intellectually valid principles by which to identify and classify them. The use of seemingly objective criteria defined in modern terms serves only to impose modern standards on the past in what is often an inappropriately presentist manner. For example, nineteenth-century cartographers identified a genre of early modern “cordiform” (heart-shaped) world maps, even though only a few of these maps were actually ♡-shaped:

An example of a map called “cordiform” because of how nineteenth-century scholars defined its mathematical structure, even though it is not actually heart-shaped. Untitled world map from Johannes Honter’s Rudimenta Cosmographia (1561), 894–95; woodcut, 12 × 15 cm. Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine; (Osher Collection).

To modern scholars, the world maps made a coherent genre because they were all products of the same projection formulae, just with different parameters. Yet a common mathematical foundation—one, moreover, unknown to the sixteenth century—does not mean that the maps possessed any kind of aesthetic, functional, or symbolic unity at the time they were produced and consumed (Watson 2008).

The delineation of genres is a matter of the application of carefully defined and consciously acknowledged criteria, i.e., criteria that have some conceptual or theoretical validity (Edney 1996). Genre delineation is a necessary part of undertaking map scholarship and has therefore been a major aspect of the post-1980 sociocultural critique. (The irony is that few sociocultural critiques have sought to explicitly define genre criteria.) In this respect, the identification of map genres is a heuristic, an aid to understanding, and is not in and of itself predictive or explanatory. Indeed, depending on the criteria one uses, the same map may fall into different genres (Lois 2015, 7). For example, the famous map of the London underground could be placed within at least four markedly different genres: by structure (topological network maps); by theme (transportation maps); by region (maps of London); by style (maps adhering to modernist aesthetics; see Wilk 2006, 407); and several more, no doubt.

The limit to the usefulness of “genre” as a methodological device in map studies stems from this last point. A work of apparently consistent form, if considered solely as a graphic image, works differently—i.e., it sustains different interpretations—within different discursive contexts. The map of the London underground cries out to be used instrumentally when displayed on the wall of an underground station, or inside a train, or on the TfL website (which offers a variety of downloadable formats to be consulted on the go). A map of the same network on a tea towel, however, serves as a touristic memento to be displayed as a commodified and exotifying logo of London. But in arguing that one map signifies variously according to context, we can easily fail to note that the underground map on the tube station wall, the underground map printed off the TfL website, and the underground map on the tea towel are not the same works. They are not all the same map. (One doesn’t see people on the Tube whip out a tea towel when trying to figure out how to navigate the underground system.) There is not some abstracted or idealized meta-image that finds expression on a variety of media (walls, paper, cloth), like a Platonic form casting flickering shadows on a cave wall, but rather a series of different artifacts that are superficially similar but that are nonetheless each produced, circulated, and consumed within discrete sets of mapping processes. (The tea towels are just one instance of the map image’s incessant reproduction within popular imagery, referring directly to the idea of London and only indirectly to the city’s actual infrastructure.) [n1] (I wrote this last paragraph well before the rant, “The Map’s the Thing.”)

Even when it seems that a map is physically relocated without being physically altered, it nonetheless changes. You’re struck by a map in a magazine, perhaps of a place that you desire to visit, or that you wish to remember, so you tear it out and stick it on your wall. The map would still have the same inks applied by the same printing process in the same places on the same support (paper) and, if carefully trimmed from the magazine rather than rudely ripped, it would be at the same size. But the act of resituating the map from the magazine (one discursive context) to the wall (another) changes the ways in which the map is going to be consumed:

An image from etsy.com, of a map on a bedroom wall in what is evidently a summer cottage, selling the idea of romance and nostalgia.

This is a key point of Martin Brückner’s (2019) entry on wall maps in Cartography in the European Enlightenment, volume 4 of The History of Cartography. “Wall maps” are not an unambiguous category of maps designed to be put on the wall, although many maps were, but are the product of a certain practice of consumption. I’m reminded in this context of Henry VIII, who had a small map of the British Isles (in the BL’s Cottonian manuscripts) that he had been given by a courtier seeking advancement (as Peter Barber 2009 showed through brilliant sleuthing), which Henry had carried along on his peregrinations, having it placed a the wall opposite his bed chamber door wherever he was staying, so that he might see his kingdom each morning.

And, of course, the relocation of materials from private archives and collections in which they were originally situated, and in which they have perhaps resided for centuries, to modern private and institutional collections into large libraries and special collections necessarily entails their complete and thorough recontextualization. For example, they can be “placed in dialogue” with other works with which they would never have been archivally contiguous in their pre-relocation existence. This is one reason why archivists try so hard to preserve archival context.

All this is to say, that “genre” is an organization of things, and as such is defined by the form or style of the map. Genre cannot say much about the precise processes by which the things were produced and consumed. In that respect, it seems more appropriate to start by identifying coherent sets of processes—modes—and then to investigate the kinds of works that each set engenders.

Modes of Mapping

A mode is a way or manner of acting. In specifically mapping terms, we can see clear patterns in how humans comprehend the world and in how they represent their comprehensions; each comprehension/representation pair is a mapping mode. (Representation is a process constitutive of meaning.[n2]) I outlined the concept of “cartographic modes” over twenty years ago (Edney 1993) and I used it in the early 2000s to organize of the encyclopedic structure of the last three volumes of The History of Cartography (Edney 2015, 2019b). However, I began to refine the concept before these volumes appeared in print (Edney 2011) and I have since prepared more up-to-date, and I would hope more conclusive, accounts (Edney 2017a; 2019a, 26–49). (See also sections 4.1 and 4.3 of my classified bibliography on this site.) The refinements affect neither the validity of the concept nor the design of the three volumes; rather they address the analytical process of identifying modes.

The real analytical unit is the particular spatial discourse, which is to say, somewhat paraphrasing Michel Foucault (1972, 80), “a regulated practice that accounts for a certain number of statements about spatial complexity.” At this stage in my thinking, I’m using “complexity” as an indicator of the perceived need or function of mapping: if a spatial situation is not complex in some way, if it does not require explanation, then there is no occasion for mapping (Edney 2019a, 41n). How and why spatial relationships are considered to be sufficiently complex to require mapping is an aspect of each particular spatial discourse.

In most of the complex work in which I have reveled over the years—from designing databases for collecting data from digitizing tables, to grant writing, to thinking about the nature of maps and mapping—I tend to try and think top-down and bottom-up at the same time. Modes are a top-down heuristic, bearing some explanatory power, but are nonetheless rather crude. The boundaries between them can be rather fluid, if most of the time they are sharp and quite clearly defined. Spatial discourses are the basis of bottom-up analysis; they are the empirical nitty-gritty. They are hard to get to, as the archival information is often lacking or hidden. But we can also think, at the mid-level, of interconnected threads of spatial discourse that can be empirically studied.

My current favorite example of particular spatial discourse is that of the urban mapping of Portland, Maine, in the first half of the nineteenth century (Edney 2017b). Local craftsmen produced a very distinctive look of urban map, with the peninsula oriented some way off true north so as to make most efficient use of the paper, with an index to key features placed in the Fore River, together with a compass rose, and the title set at upper right in the Back Cove:

A Plan of Portland, Engraved for the Directory. By D. G. Johnson. 1831. Variant 2. Issued in Directory (1831). Copper engraving. Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine (Osher Collection).

We might even call the products of this particular discourse of urban mapping, a “genre.” But doing so does not help us explore how the spatial discourse developed, its internal complexities, and how and why it was steadily eroded after 1836.

One major implication: there is no single super-genre of “map,” to be subdivided hierarchically.

A further major implication: there is no simple correlation between the look/form of maps and the modes that produced them. One example is that the “master charts” maintained by the Armazém de Guiné e Índia in Portugal and by the Casa de la Contratación in Spain—respectively, the carta padrão de el-Rei and the padron real—were not themselves used at sea but were used to create new marine maps of particular seas or coasts. But they were copied in toto as ornate manuscripts for distribution to elite landlubbers as works of geographical knowledge (Fernández-Armesto 2007) and further engendered printed derivations for consumption by lesser elites interested in the rapid increase of geographical knowledge:

Martin Waldseemüller, Orbis typus universalis iuxta hydrographorum traditionem (“Map of the whole world according to the tradition of mariners”) from the supplement of modern maps in his edition of Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography: Martin Waldseemüller, Matthias Ringmann, Jacob Aeszler, and Georg Übelin, Geographie opus nouissima traductione e Grecorum archtypis castigatissime (Strasbourg: Johannes Schott, 1513), fols. 119v–120r. Woodcut, 44.5 × 57.5 cm (paper). Courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library and Mapping Boston Foundation.

While this world map replicated the look of a marine chart, with its mesh of rhumb lines representing compass directions, a scale at bottom center for distance, and a latitude scale at left reflecting the practices of Atlantic sailing, it was nonetheless a work intended for geographical consumption. The replication of marine conventions emphasized the derivation of new geographical information from the voyages made by European explorers (Edney 2019a, 34). The kicker that places this map within a geographical rather than marine discourse is that it was included within an edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. By genre it’s a marine chart, by mode, it’s a product of geographical mapping.

– – –

I could go on—and on, and on—and I certainly need to devote a number of posts to examples and explication of spatial discourses, but I need to draw this post to a close. I know that some of my friends like to think of genre in terms of process, but for me the term “genre” is nonetheless too wrapped up in form and style. I can accept “genre” when applied to the products of a particular spatial discourse or thread of spatial discourses, but by actively conceptualizing the modes of mapping, we can (1) stay focused on the ways in which people have variously produced, circulated, and consumed the things that we loosely call “maps,” and (2) avoid the trap of thinking about the super-genre of “the map.”

Notes

n1. In writing this section, I am suddenly reminded of the calendars and personal organizers I sometimes received for birthdays or for Christmas, when I was a young adult growing up in the London suburbs, each of which featured some version of the London underground map. At the time, callow youth that I was, I noted the map but did not think to wonder whether there were other editions of the calendars that featured infrastructural maps of the U.K.’s other cities. (Glasgow has had an underground since 1896, and Liverpool was gaining one in the 1970s; did Weegie and Scouse diaries include maps of those systems?) Now, I feel stunned at the implication that everyone in the U.K. should, as a matter of default, require a map of the London tube, regardless of where in the U.K. they actually live. Talk about the parochial conceit of the primate city!

n2. I try to use “represent” only as a verb, as an action; “representation” is the gerund, meaning the act or process of representing. It is unfortunately common to refer to “a representation” or to “representations,” i.e., a thing or things that represent, but this usage is misleading and shifts the analytical emphasis from the process to the thing. In doing so, this improper usage helps sustain the idea that “representation” is properly mimetic, whereas it is a constructive or constitutive process.

References

Barber, Peter. 2009. King Henry’s Map of the British Isles: BL Cotton MS Augustus I i 9. London: Folio Society.

Brückner, Martin. 2019. “Wall Map.” In Cartography in the European Enlightenment, edited by Matthew H. Edney, and Mary S. Pedley, 1636–38. Vol. 4 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Edney, Matthew H. 1993. “Cartography without ‘Progress’: Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking.” Cartographica 30, nos. 2–3: 54–68.

———. 1996. “Theory and the History of Cartography.” Imago Mundi 48: 185–91.

———. 2011. “Progress and the Nature of ‘Cartography’.” In Classics in Cartography: Reflections on Influential Articles from Cartographica, edited by Martin Dodge, 331–42. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell.

———. 2015. “Modes of Cartographic Practice.” In Cartography in the Twentieth Century, edited by Mark Monmonier, 978–80. Vol. 6 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2017a. “Map History: Discourse and Process.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography, edited by Alexander J. Kent, and Peter Vujakovic, 68–79. London: Routledge.

———. 2017b. “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.

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

———. 2019b. “Modes of Cartographic Practice.” In Cartography in the European Enlightenment, edited by Matthew H. Edney and Mary S. Pedley, 1017–19. Vol. 4 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. 2007. “Maps and Exploration in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.” In Cartography in the European Renaissance, edited by David Woodward, 738–70. Vol. 3 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hodgkiss, Alan G. Understanding Maps: A Systematic Enquiry of their Use and Development. Folkestone, Kent: Dawson, 1981.

Lois, Carla. 2015. “El mapa, los mapas: Propuestas metodógicas para aborder la pluralidad y la inestabilidad de la imagen cartográfica.” Geograficando 11, no. 1: separately paginated. Online at http://www.geograficando.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/article/view/Geov11n01a02.

Watson, Ruth. 2008. “Cordiform Maps since the Sixteenth Century: The Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Classificatory Systems.” Imago Mundi 60, no. 2: 182–94.

Wilk, Christopher. 2006. Modernism, Designing a New World: 1914-1939. London: V & A Publications.