Geography 222 The Power of Maps and GIS
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Geog 222 Lecture Outline: The Power of Maps & GIS Revisited
Update: 10/12/09
The Power of Maps & GIS revisited from the first lecture:
- maps as an ancient phenomena familiar to many different cultures
- major technological advances and impact
- maps kill!
- discoveries with maps: we learn new things from maps, rather than just
show what we know.
- maps shape how we see the world
Broad issues in lectures and readings... maps working in the real world:
- Monmonier ch. 5 Maps that Advertise
- Monmonier ch. 6 Development Maps
- Monmonier ch. 7 Propaganda Maps
- Monmonier ch. 8 Defence Maps
- Monmonier ch. 9 Large Scale Maps
- Krygier & Wood ch. 1, 2, and 4 + blog
Maps & Fiction: The Power of Maps:
Muehrcke and Muehrcke "Maps in Literature"
- Phillip Muehrcke is Professor Emeritus of Geography at
the University of Wisconsin. He has written extensively on maps and mapping, and
is author of a well known text called Map Use. His wife, Juliana, is a writer
on educational issues, and his collaborator on several cartographic texts.
The paradox of mapping
- p. 317: maps can't reproduce complex reality, but that is their allure
- p. 319: maps can't be both revealing and complete
- p. 323: marks on sheet brings to mind a multidimensional world, emotions...
- p. 329: fascination: map as more and less than itself; truthful but omits much
- p. 337: map projections, scale reduction, static, selective, abstract: but allow
us to see reality much better, understand, spur imagination...
Imaginative map use
- p. 319: need to have an imagination to read a map
- p. 320: imaginative map use leads to a map being more than itself
Unimaginative map use
- p. 320: objective, detached, emotionless decision making: military
Mistaking the map for the landscape
- p. 323: related to unimaginative map use: but quite imaginative
- p. 324: reading maps instead of traveling?
- p. 325: blank spaces spur imagination
- p. 334-5: Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn: the color of the states
The authority of maps
- p. 326: maps more authoritative than words? people not critical of maps?
- p. 326: Catch-22 (Heller): change the map, change reality
In the end... "Cartography is a fluid art." Miss Dove (p. 335)
A.N.L. Munby "An Encounter in the Mist"
- Munby was librarian of King's College, Cambridge
(England) from 1947 to 1974. Munby wrote "An Encounter in the Mist" while
a held as a prisoner of war in Germany (1943-45). The book this story appears
in (The Alabaster Hand) is dedicated to
M.R. James, the greatest ghost story writer of all time.
Subject: Trust in maps...and...maps that kill!
- the world changes and maps don't always change
- trust in maps...by the living and dead
- why do we trust maps so much?
Jorge Luis Borges "Funes the Memorious"
- Borges, Jorge Luis (1899-1986), Argentine writer, whose
challenging and unconventional poetry and fiction made him one of
the foremost figures in 20th-century literature. In his writing Borges
created a fantastic, totally subjective, and deeply metaphysical world.
Describing his work, Borges wrote, "I am neither a thinker nor a
moralist, but simply a man of letters who turns his own perplexities
and that respected system of perplexities we call philosophy into the
forms of literature."
- Born in Buenos Aires, the son of a teacher, Borges was educated in
Geneva, Switzerland, and lived briefly in Spain. In 1921 he returned
to Argentina, where he helped found several literary and
philosophical periodicals and wrote lyrical poetry on historical
Argentine themes. "Funes the Memorius" is found in a collection of Borges
short stories called Labyrinths. From
Encarta
Did Borges invent the internet? Here
and here.
Subject: Narrator telling story of Ireneo Funes, 19 yrs old
- paralyzed in a fall from a horse
- profoundly affected his memory
- p. 63: "when he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness"
- then what he remembered...
- p. 64: reconstructed a whole day, but it took a whole day
- p. 65: "Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree in every wood, but
also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it"
- p. 65: "He was...almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort."
- impossible to comprehend that dog embraced so many unlike individuals
- can't even comprehend the same dog at different times of the day
- p. 66: "I suspect...that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to
forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of
Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence."
One of the paradoxes of human thought and maps: abstract, generalize, and
forget details - in order to help us think and understand...
Explore all these fascinating issues in the superbly interesting
take-home mid-term exam.
E-mail: jbkrygier@owu.edu
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