Right Map Making

Here is a copy of Right Map Making: Five Ways to Make Maps for a Future to be Possible by Steven R. Holloway. It's a great 'manifesto' and I am posting it here as it is readily available online and I think he wouldn't mind it being on this blog. Dr. Holloway is an academic in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia in the US, specialising in urban geography and diversity.

Holloway says: "The problem for the makers of maps being that our maps are, in part, engaged in the wanton destruction of the world".

You will need to download the image, or zoom in on your screen, in order to read the manifesto itself.

This is NOT my Summer!

Yesterday (Saturday September 15) I went to an excellent cartography workshop at the university campus called Campfire on Wild Cat Island: Workshop about literary maps, fictional geography and...holiday memories.

My own map, above, is a ribbon map. These types of map are new to me, but I like their linear form. I decided to create one on the three places I visited this summer: London, Leamington Spa and Hunstanton. They highlight the urban phenomenon I came across on my travels - anything from a Porsche to a boarded up Spar shop. They also contain a few animals: a squirrel, a cat and a Herring Gull. Some topiary. The London Eye and the Boston Stump. My map also contains two tiny maps. If you can spot them, let me know what places they represent and I'll tell you if they are correct!

I decided to name it This is NOT my Summer! because obviously it isn't - it's a map!

Links:
Emotionally Mapping the Campus
Maps of Competence
Cartography: Representation and Revealing the Hidden

Emotionally Mapping the Campus

University of Leeds Cartography Workshop

This week, as a change from teaching cultural theory to first year BA students, I decided to run a cartography workshop to support last week's lecture on space and the city. I set the task of making an emotional map of the campus. These are the three that were awarded first (Amy Dawson - above) and joint second prizes (Bob Palmer and Katerina Lee - below).

Links:
University of Leeds
Emotion Maps - Christian Nold

Maps of Competence - Félix Guattari

Extract from The Machinic Unconscious (1979) by Félix Guattari:

Maps themselves are like laboratories where experimentations on tracings are set in interactions. Thus, here the map is opposed to the structure; it can open itself in all its dimensions; it can also be ripped apart; it can be adapted to all kinds of assemblies. A pragmatic map can be started by an isolated individual or a group, it can be painted on a wall, it can be conceived as a work of art, it can be conducted as a political action or as a mediation. For a type of performance, a particular assemblage of enunciation, or a redundant tracing being given, what is important is determining whether or not it modifies the unconscious map of a local pragmatic competence. (page 172)

Links:
Axis of Exploration and Failure (schizocartography)
Guattari's Schizoanalytic Cartographies
On Massumi's Logic of Relation