The Power of Maps
Author
Denis Wood, with John Fels. Guilford Press, New York, 1992. 248 pages. ISBN 0-89862-493-2 paperback, 0-89862-492-4 hardcover.[1]
Wood taught in the School of Design at North Carolina State University from 1974 to 1996 and is the author of a dozen books and more than 150 papers.[2] John Fels was Adjunct Associate Professor in the Graduate GIS Faculty at North Carolina State University until his death in 2014.[3]
The book was written for an exhibition Wood curated, The Power of Maps, at the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design in New York, running October 1992 to March 1993 and remounted at the Smithsonian in Washington in 1994.[3][4]
Description
Wood's argument is that maps are not impartial reference objects but instruments of communication, persuasion, and power, and that like paintings they express a point of view.[2] Every map has an author with an agenda, and the reader's task is to work out what that agenda is.
The stronger claim is that maps do not describe a pre-existing reality so much as bring one into being. Property lines, voting rights, taxation districts, and enterprise zones could not exist without maps, and the map is what connects people to that reality while embodying and projecting the interests of whoever made it.[2]
Central to the argument is what a map leaves out. Selection is not incidental to cartography, it is the whole of the operation, and the interests served by a map are visible in its omissions as much as in its content. Wood's further point is that this interest is concealed. The conventions of cartographic presentation, the grid, the scale bar, the neutral typography, function as a claim to objectivity that removes the author from view and presents a set of choices as a simple record of what is there.
Illustrations range widely to make the point that all of these are maps doing the same kind of work: Peter Gould's AIDS map, Tom Van Sant's satellite image map of the earth, United States Geological Survey sheets, and a child's drawing of the world.[1]
The closing chapter turns the argument toward use. If the interest a map serves belongs to its maker, then anyone who makes maps can serve their own interest, which is the opening Wood later developed into his work on counter-mapping.
Contents
Introduction · 1. Maps work by serving interests · 2. Maps are embedded in a history they help construct · 3. Every map shows this... but not that · 4. The interest the map serves is masked · 5. The interest is embodied in the map in signs and myths · 6. Each sign has a history · 7. The interest the map serves can be yours · Index[2]
The publisher's listing prints chapter 6 as "Each side has a history," which appears to be a transcription error given the subject of chapter 5. Worth checking against a physical copy before this list is relied on.
Reception
Mary L. Larsgaard, of the Map and Imagery Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, reviewed the book for Library Journal in 1992. She judged that it stands on its own apart from the exhibition and that its aim of teaching readers to identify a cartographer's agenda is well served, while faulting the prose as wordy and heavy with ellipses, and cautioning that Wood's reasoning occasionally runs to invention, citing his explanation for why USGS sheets lack full legends. She recommended it for general collections as well as cartography collections.
Later work
Wood returned to the subject in Rethinking the Power of Maps (Guilford, 2010), which addresses how cartography enabled the rise of the modern state and surveys counter-mapping practices, including critical cartography, participatory GIS, and map art.[5] His other books include Making Maps, with John Krygier, and Weaponizing Maps, with Joe Bryan.[3]
The book sits alongside J.B. Harley's "Deconstructing the Map" (1989) as a founding text of critical cartography, which treats maps as documents to be read for their politics rather than checked for their accuracy.
Related Reading
- The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World
- Else/Where: Mapping - New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
- The Image of the City
- Envisioning Information
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
- Simulacra and Simulation
- Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series
- Decoding Advertisements
- Culture and Space: Conceiving a New Cultural Geography
- Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
External Links
- Publisher page, Guilford Press
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 [ http://amzn.to/eOyw3b The Power of Maps], Guilford Press.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 The Power of Maps, Routledge.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Rethinking the Power of Maps, author page, Guilford Press.
- ↑ Denis Wood, Wikipedia.
- ↑ Rethinking the Power of Maps, Routledge.
