1,721,038 research outputs found
Mapclash: sulle fratture e ricomposizioni degli «spazi cartografici» della geografa culturale
Full text linkA partire dagli anni Ottanta, la critica della ragione cartografica ha acceso intensi dibattiti all’interno della geografia. Per molti geografi, le mappe costituiscono delle rappresentazioni riduttive e inerti dello spazio; per altri si tratta di pericolosi strumenti in grado di manipolare la percezione del territorio. Mentre le suddette interpretazioni richiedono un’attenta decostruzione del potere negativo e coercitivo che sottende la carta e i suoi apparati sociopolitici, una nuova ondata di studi promuove un’esplorazione creativa delle potenzialità del mapping. Per dare un senso a questa ampia, e spesso contraddittoria, serie di dibattiti, l’articolo esamina la posizione della mappa nella geografia culturale attraverso una pe- culiare chiave analitica: il mapclash. Il mapclash, letteralmente lo scontro sullo statuto della mappa, dischiude una teoria conflittuale che designa l’atto di rottura tra geografia e cartografia; enfatizza il gesto iconoclastico della distruzione della carta operato dai geografi nel corso del postmoderno; infine, coglie il cortocircuito generato dall’incontro fra l’approccio ermeneutico-decostruttivo e la contemporanea teoria cartografica, post-/non-rappresentazionale. Confrontando i diversi posizionamenti che emergono dallo scontro tra potestas e potentia, Mappa e mappe, rappresentazione ed evento, l’articolo propone di ragionare tanto sulle fratture quanto sulle possibili ricomposizioni di nuovi spazi cartografici per la geografia culturale
Between hyperboles and litotes: The middle passage of everyday cartographic nationhood
No full textIn receiving the constructive commentaries on our article, we would like to gratefully reply through an invitation to remain in a sort of middle passage between hyperbolic and litotic attitudes towards map theory and research on mapping practices. While thinking hyperbolically functions to destabilise both cartographic representation and nation as categories, thinking litotically becomes a way to reason (and empirically investigate) in terms of contingency, contextuality, circulation, materiality, and affectivity. Embracing a post-representational and everyday perspective on both mapping and nationhood, we acknowledge both the high risk and potential of this style of thinking and researching maps and nations
The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities
No full textThe Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities offers a vibrant exploration of the
intersection and convergence between map studies and the humanities through the multifaceted
traditions and inclinations from different disciplinary, geographical and cultural
contexts.
With 42 chapters from leading scholars, this book provides an intellectual infrastructure
to navigate core theories, critical concepts, phenomenologies and ecologies of mapping,
while also providing insights into exciting new directions for future scholarship. It is
organised into seven parts:
• Part 1 moves from the depths of the humans-maps relation to the posthuman dimension,
from antiquity to the future of humanity, presenting a multidisciplinary perspective that
bridges chronological distances, introspective instances and social engagements.
• Part 2 draws on ancient, archaeological, historical and literary sources, to consider
the materialities and textures embedded in such texts. Fictional and non-fictional
cartographies are explored, including layers of time, mobile historical phenomena,
unmappable terrain features and even animal perspectives.
• Part 3 examines maps and mappings from a medial perspective, offering theoretical
insight into cartographic mediality as well as studies of its intermedial relations with
other media.
• Part 4 explores how a cultural cartographic perspective can be productive in researching
the digital as a human experience, considering the development of a cultural attentiveness
to a wide range of map-related phenomena that interweave human subjectivities and
nonhuman entities in a digital ecology.
• Part 5 addresses a range of issues and urgencies that have been, and still are, at the centre
of critical cartographic thinking, from politics, inequalities and discrimination.
• Part 6 considers the growing amount of literature and creative experimentation that
involve mapping in practices of eliciting individual life histories, collective identities and
self-accounts.
• Part 7 examines the variety of ways in which we can think of maps in the public realm
Reimagining the national map
No full textThe map of the nation may be considered a power tool that persists in reproducing exclusive forms of nationalism in response to migration crises. Yet, in this article, we argue that in an era marked by new, rampant rhetoric regarding nationalism, maps are surprisingly among the few spaces left to cultivate progressive imaginaries of cultural diversity and migration as intrinsic, positive features of national experiences. Discussing critical readings of national mappings, we encourage a dialogue between map studies and nation and nationalism studies through the lens of everyday cartographic nationhood. Taking Italy as a context of analysis, the paper considers subject centred refabrications of national maps (IncarNations), alien phenomenologies of national cartographic objects (AlieNations), and transformative creative cartographies of migrant nations (ContamiNations) to promote an alternative understanding of the national map as a sensitive tool of pluralism in multicultural societies
Leaving or rescuing the (story) map? - commentary to Saxinger, Sancho Reinoso and Wentzel
Full text linkThis paper reflects on some issues raised by the reading of Saxinger, Sancho Reinoso and Wentzel essay (published in the last issue of Fennia) and their theoretical and methodological concerns on how to conciliate geographic information systems (GIS) ontology with the representation of spatial-fuzzy qualitative data emerging out of ethnographic research. Recalling the intense debate between cartographers, GIS scientists and human geographers on the limits and failures of cartographic representation, the counterfactual doubt raised by Pickles in his book A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-coded World, published in 2004, resonates strongly: “What if, after all, cartography and maps were not what we thought they were . . . or at least not only what we thought they were?” (page 194). Restoring such a question for the sake of this commentary is a way to rework the issue in an era of pervasive digital mapping, not by replacing the “quantitative” map with the “story” map – the dialectical model that has accompanied the critique of geographers during the 1980s and 1990s – but by multiplying the theoretical perspectives on the humanistic potential of maps, moving beyond the narrowed normative focus on “effective” storytelling as put by the recent The ESRI Story Map
Extroverting Cartography. “Seensing” maps and data through art
Full text linkDrawing attention to the “extroversion” of geographic language, in this paper I explore the proliferation of mapping and its spatial fragments outside geography and, specifically, in the fabric of contemporary art. Art theories and practices consistently involve, as an effect of the spatial turn, cartographic textures and grammars by differently highlighting the manifold functions, mediations and materializations of maps. Inspired by the engagement, particularly of women artists, with cartography, I discuss the artistic exploration of mapping through various interpretative categories such as “spatial (de)generation”, “temporal proximity”, “ecologism” and “dataism/datactivism”. Each notion often entails a distinctive practice of seeing (that is, observing and interpreting) and sensing (namely, feeling and materially experiencing) artistic mapping and data – which, woven together, may explicitly refer to what I term the practice of “seensing”. This way, multiple insights to art maps’ visuality, materiality and perception of space are given. In conclusion, I consider the pros and cons that an aesthetic encounter with mapping gives to geography and to its creative transformation
Maps In/Out Of Place. Charting alternative ways of looking and experimenting with cartography and GIS
Full text linkNowadays, new speculative and experimental ferments on analog and digital mapping are variously infusing both “insiders” (geographers, cartographers, urban planners, GIS scientists) and “outsiders” (Art historians and creative practitioners)’ work. To properly evidence and discuss the excitement of mapping that is emerging through a wide range of visual and aesthetical contributions, it is important to contextualize and compare such unconventional practices of map-making in terms of reflexivity and transitivity of geographic knowledge production. This means respectively to distinguish different roles assumed by geographers, cartographers and GIS scientists in the interpretation and application of new theories and practices of mapping, but also to take seriously into consideration the creative mapping culture which is becoming visible outside of their discipline, for example in the artistic domain. In this report, I focus on the “reflexive” stance, by giving a personal, thus not exhaustive, overview of the creative trajectories on mapping currently explored in carto/geography. After emplacing the theory and experimentation on maps and geospatial data within the context of academic geographic production, I discuss three projects where geographers and GISscientists are at the forefront of the concurrent rethinking of the map as a deforming and multidimensional tool for spatial analysis
Introduction: Why Cartographic Humanities?
No full textThe humanities have been part of geographical knowledge and its expression for centuries,
finding in maps and cartographic imaginations useful and intimate companions to reflect
with, challenge and advance new spatial paradigms, methods and metaphors. After the more
recent rise of the ‘spatial turn’ in the arts and humanities and the proliferation of digital
technologies in several cultural domains, new research areas such as spatial digital humanities,
geohumanities, deep mapping and map art, to name a few, have shown that the engagements
of scholars and practitioners with cartography and mapping practices have expanded
further, becoming increasingly diverse and highly mutable. In parallel to the growing fascination
with cartography that arose within various humanistic fields, in the last 15 years, we
have witnessed the emergence of ‘map studies’ as a transversal research area that is strongly
affected by humanistic approaches and methodologies. This area intersects not only more
established traditions such as the history of cartography and critical cartography but also the
multifaceted realm of ‘cultural cartography’ (Cosgrove, 2008). The Routledge Handbook of
Cartographic Humanities is precisely designed to explore the intersection and convergence
between cultural map studies and the humanities, expressing multifaceted traditions and
inclinations coming from different disciplinary, geographical and cultural contexts
Mapping as the Art of Listening to Jewish Mediterranean Migrations
No full textHow can we make sense of both large-scale migration phenomena as well as the unique, individual fragments which composed them? When reading history from an anthropological perspective, how can we draw meaningful connections between ordinary life trajectories and larger societal issues? In this chapter, I discuss maps and mapping in the context of contemporary Jewish migrations (and recollections thereof) from North Africa and the Middle East across the Mediterranean and examine the map&letter Ze haya be-leil Shabbat, The Eve of the Shabbat. In the context of research-creation practices, creative mapping represents a powerful way to train, in sociologist Les Back terms, our art of listening, that is the ability to see how individual trajectories can shed light on larger socio-historical phenomena
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