1. Becoming Strangers: Travel, Trust, and the Everyday Day 23: Maps and Mapping

2. What Is a Map?

3. The Oxford English Dictionary Speaketh MAP. A drawing or other representation of the earth's surface or a part of it made on a flat surface, showing the distribution of physical or geographical features (and often also including socio-economic, political, agricultural, meteorological, etc., information), with each point in the representation corresponding to an actual geographical position according to a fixed scale or projection; a similar representation of the positions of stars in the sky, the surface of a planet, or the like. Also: a plan of the form or layout of something, as a route, a building, etc.

4. Is This Definition 100% Accurate?

5. Cartography: A Crash Course Cartographers distinguish the following kinds of tools: – PLAT – a graphical representation used for determining boundaries & land ownership – CHART – used for navigational purposes – MAP – used for general reference purposes Each of these tools has different (though intersecting) histories. The “purposes” that they serve have varied greatly from era to era. Beware: cartographers, like everyday people, will use “map” both in the above specialized sense and as an umbrella term covering plats, charts, and (the more narrowly defined version of) maps.

6. Plats: The Oldest “Maps” Oldest surviving “maps” are plats from Mesopotamia dating from ca. 2300 BCE: schematic drawings with accompanying cuneiform text. It was crucial in Mesopotamia (and later Egypt) to keep track of boundaries between farms – the annual floods erased most landmarks.

7. Charts: How to Get There Appears that charts predate literacy. Originally very much embedded in an oral culture. The chart would be drawn while directions were given. Few or no names provided on the chart; scale unimportant. Essentially, a presentation of prominent or famous landmarks in a particular sequence. Sometimes charts would be left to inform later travelers which way to go to reach a particular site, or which way to go to catch up with someone. Again: minimal information provided, such as a few arrows and signs on birch back, or a few glyphs on a rock in a desert.

8. Ak Ko Mok Ki’s “Map” (1801) Ak Ko Mok Ki, a Blackfoot chief from the Great Plains, charted Western North America for Peter Fidler, a surveyor from the Hudson Bay Company. The Pacific Ocean is at the top. The Rocky Mountains appear in the middle as a double line. Single lines are rivers. The numbered circles are tribes, with names provided by an accompanying key.

9. Oceans are Dangerous! Sailing on the ocean required good information—or else you wreck & lose lots of money & lives. In Mediterranean and Europe, very detailed shore charts ( peripla ) begin appearing in classical times. You had to know where the islands, how deep the water, what rivers navigable, etc.

10. “Age of Discovery” and Charts European voyages across Atlantic and into Pacific required charting the open ocean. This led to very elaborate & accurate devices for determining your precise location. These ocean maps are the origins of the present- day (Western) assumption that maps are “to scale” and “faithful” to geography. (If they weren’t, you were dead!)

11. Maps – Organizing the World Oldest map (in narrow sense) dates from ca. 650 BCE. It depicts the city of Babylon at the center of a disk of lands surrounded by the “bitter river.” “Faithful” not to geographic fact but to a worldview.

12. “Pawnee Star Chart” Taken in 1906 from a bundle of artifacts sacred to the Pawnee. Depicts earthly sites and stars superimposed in same “space.” Directional arrows indicate whether a site is “ascending” (earthly) or “descending” (celestial). One is believed to walk in both realms simultaneously.

13. “Fifty Nifty United States...”

14. Jasper Johns, Map (1961)

15. “Imaginary” Maps?

16. “Imaginary” Map?

17. Julie Mehretu Born 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Father is Ethiopian, mother is from Alabama. Grows up in Michigan, educated in Senegal & Rhode Island. Currently resides in New York. Art is based on aerial maps, maps of airports, architectural drawings, city maps, public transport maps, and other common kinds of maps.

18. Julie Mehretu, Congress (2003)

19. Up Close Viewing

20. Julie Mehretu, Renegade Delirium (2002)

21. Julie Mehretu, Ruffian Logistics (2001)

22. Julie Mehretu at the Walker Arts Center While in residence at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Mehretu interviewed 30 high school students of East African descent and created a web site “mapping” the region from their perspectives.