Hey SuperForesters
I’ve been thinking about maps recently and thought I would share with you my cartographical noodlings. I’ve always liked maps in the way that I think a lot of people find them fascinating as children – from ‘here be dragons’ to maps of hidden pirate treasure – as previously uncharted territory of the imagination.
I remember being particularly enthralled by a global map of the ocean floor – the blue depths looked like mountain peaks and the relatively small amount of landmass was suddenly apparent.
Maps can be beautiful objects, feeding imagination and curiosity as well as teaching us the shape of our world – but what shape do we see?
Well, when we’re creating our own maps, we give them our meaning. In a 1976 study, Stanley Milgram found that maps we draw are distorted by places of special significance for us. We use maps as meaning making devices – giving us a visual framework to think within. Mental maps are:
imaginary diagrams people use to navigate through physical space (neighborhoods, cities or countries). These are simple images of “where things are” or “what places should be avoided.” Although resembling to a certain extent physical geography, mental maps are often inflected by preconceptions, values and emotions. In mental maps physical distances are distorted, being under or over estimated according to the subjective importance of the destination point. In addition, geographic spaces are “colored” in people’s mind according to what people believe about the inhabitants, reputation or other social characteristics of those geographic spaces. For example, desirable areas might appear as “green”/”no problem” spaces, while feared areas might appear as “red”/”don’t go” zones.
(this is one of the reasons I loved SuperForester Chris’ wonderfully purple election map)
We reflect what we feel in the personal maps that we make – but do maps in turn shape our worldview? I think the answer to this must be yes – have you experienced how jarring it can be to see a global map showing the true relative sizes of landmasses (as opposed to the traditional but distorting Mercator projection we were (or used to be?) brought up with as standard)? Or how disorienting it is to see the world “upside down”?
So if at least a part of how we visualise the world is based on the images we carry in us from the maps we see, then we can choose what maps we use and perhaps shift our perceptions accordingly!
If you haven’t done it before, check out World Mapper’s truly eye-opening maps, distorted to reflect hundreds of varied criteria – such as this one of meat imports:
Or this map of the blogosphere - showing our very real interconnectedness, regardless of oceans, timezones and distance:
And if none of these grab you, there’s a world of awesome maps out there with the ability to tilt your angle of perception.
Now for the treat that got me thinking on this train: For US SuperForesters (or for all of us, when thinking of our US brothers and sisters), maybe not for navigating your cross-country trip, but next time you look out the window and imagine your fine nation, why not think of it like this?
Another print by Beauchamping, this map, ‘States United‘ (where states appear to scale and unrotated) was “created as a learning tool for kids without the normal division of east, west, north or south. it’s a way to see the entirety of a nation not based on location, but rather it’s individual parts with the heart as a metaphor for completeness.”
What would a map of SuperForest look like?
Love
P
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