Hand-Drawn Maps

I have been working with some mapping software, Google Earth and with ArcGIS, placing old maps onto satellite maps. Obviously, the old maps are inaccurate, but inaccurate in an interesting way. These cartographers produce a graphical representation that reflects their perception of the land, reflecting a human knowledge that satellite mapping cannot contain.

In Google Earth's "Featured Content" section, there is a 1733 map of North America (Rumsey Historical Maps) which is marvelously detailed and also remarkably out of scale. Some areas are foreshortened and twisted beyond recognition—Nova Scotia is grotesquely distorted, showing a basic misunderstanding of its shape and essential features. Other areas contain details which, while accurate, are out of proportion. For example, the area that Cooper uses as the setting for The Last of the Mohicans is out of scale, being larger than it is in reality (in the figure at the right, the yellow lines running diagonally up the image show the course of the Saint Laurence, which are considerably higher on the 1733 map). This distortion of scale could reflect some facts, especially the importance which the map's creator held a specific area of land, or the degree to which a piece of land had been explored or viewed as significant for navigation or trade.

In other words, the inaccuracies convey meaning and a type of knowledge. They are the kind of street-level knowledge Steven Johnson celebrates in The Ghost Map. Johnson sees today's mashups and online mapping applications as bringing something new to geographical knowledge. As he sees it, one of the key principles of this new generation of online maps is, "the importance of amateurs and unofficial 'local experts'" (Johnson, 225). However, looking at old, hand-drawn maps, one can find evidence of this same local expertise and local focus, if one cares to look for it. However, the mapping software is perhaps the best lens through which we can look to find this distortion.

What do maps bring to texts?

They can illustrate

Namely, maps can allow the reader to understand the relation between people or events and places in a text. The reader can say, "Ah, now I see," and move on with reading.

They can be integral

Maps can be an essential part of the text—an important part of proving an argument or convincing the reader of a fact.

They can be tools for new knowledge and discovery

Maps can be open (perhaps the same way a text can be open) allowing readers to add their own knowledge and experience to the structured information that the maps contain and generate new information and knowledge.

They can be entry points

Instead of being secondary, or supplemental, maps could potentially be the way one enters a text. Much like someone wandering the streets of a city who comes across a plaque marking an historical event, the geogrpahic location is the trigger or starting point for the investigation

The obvious point to add is that with portable networked devices, the map becomes the abstraction of a real physical place one may be standing, and the entry point to an online text.

Does then the text become different. One suddenly sees the text not as the primary entity (the ground and starting point) but as the annotation, as it were to the physical place. In what way could or should the text be reconfigured to represent this changed hierarchy, or should it be?