cartography assumes that maps make reality as much as they represent it” (15). Critical cartographers then understand mapping as an active practice that can shape knowledge, reflect power dynamics, and serve as a means for advancing social change (15). One type of mapping made possible through a critique of critical cartography is what Crampton and Krygier refer to as “everyday mappings” (25). Everyday mappings may be “experiential or narrative, and creatively illuminate the role of space in people’s lives by countering generalized and global perspectives” (25). The digital maps created by GPS devices, for example, fit the bill well; as chapter four will discuss in more detail, they are multimodal, rhetorical, everyday texts created in the moment by users who want tailored information about their immediate environments. These cartographic texts, much like the work of other spatial artifacts and representations, have both an immediate impact on contextualized, bodily experience as well as broader consequences within and beyond the rhetorical situation. Other mappings may resemble more traditional modes of visual representation such as photographs, more so than what we might typically consider to be a map. In the discussion that follows, I first describe more specifically how maps function as rhetorical artifacts through their potential for visual and textual interplay, selectivity, and modes of projection, as well as the ways in which they are always already implicated in cultural practice. Next, to better contextualize the intersections of visual rhetoric and critical cartography, I provide a brief analysis of a visual artifact that counts as both iconic photograph and map: Photo 22727, also known as the “Blue Marble.” An analysis of this image not only helps show the connections between visual rhetoric and critical cartography but also begins to demonstrate how visual rhetoric can be more attentive to the relationships between materiality, space, and the body.
The Map as Rhetorical Artifact
The late geographer J.B. Harley conveys an understanding of the map as rhetorical and able to present arguments about the world when he writes: “My position is to accept that rhetoric is part of the way all texts work and that all maps are rhetorical texts. [. . .] All maps strive to frame their message in the context of an audience. All maps state an argument about the world [. . .]. All maps employ the common devices of rhetoric such as invocations of authority” (242). While Harley understands the map as contextually-specific and as requiring a specific audience and purpose, his work is sometimes critiqued for its more inward focus on the production of the map itself, rather than on the “nuanced and multiform” processes of mapping and the social and political contexts that inform “the production of geographical images” (Pickles, A History of Spaces 146). In describing cartography’s recent turn to “processual” modes of knowing, Leila Harris and Helen Hazen advocate for a focus on the “multiple, reiterative production and reproduction of maps as they are engaged in multiple times and spaces,” rather than focusing solely on the power dynamics that inform the production of specific maps (51).
Interplay of Text and Image.
In rethinking the ways in which mapping is informed by specific contexts and relationships, Harris and Hazen also note that “key insights are possible by analyzing the ways that lines and colours become maps, are given meaning, and are performed in relation to specific knowledges or techniques, or through relational engagements involving mapmakers or users” (51). The idea that the graphical features of the map not only shape its meaning but are also informed by the cultural contexts and relational processes in which mapmakers and users are immersed broaches an understanding of the map as both sign system and cultural artifact.
Noted cartographers Denis Wood and John Fels likewise understand the cultural work of the map but also acknowledge its fundamental composition as a sign system that is comprised of both word and image when they describe a map’s meaning as tied to the interplay of visual and textual elements inherent in its display: “As word lends icon access to the semantic field of its culture, icon invites word to realize its expressive potentials in the visual field. The result is the dual signification virtually synonymous with maps, and the complementary exchange of meaning that it engenders” (Wood and Fels, “Designs on Signs” 80). Acknowledging the semiotic components of the map, cartographer David Turnbull notes that cartographic representation generally falls under two main categories: iconic and symbolic. Aligned with Peirceian semiotics, Turnbull understands iconic representation as bearing a direct likeness to the feature it describes; it attempts “to directly portray certain visual aspects of the piece of territory in question,” whereas a symbolic representation taps into social contexts in order to make meaning, and makes use of “purely conventional signs and symbols, like letters, numbers, or graphic devices” (3). Many Western maps employ both iconic and symbolic features; however, this is not to say they explicitly distinguish between the two modes of representation. Rather, these two modes are common and implicit functions of cartographic convention and representation.5
Selectivity
Similarly, Ben Barton and Marthalee Barton note that part of how the map creates meaning is through its selectivity, or through the inclusion and exclusion of information (55). Lawrence Prelli also demonstrates the notion of the rhetorical selectivity of display in his analysis of the Georges Bank and the boundary line dividing “United States and Canadian jurisdiction over resources in the Gulf of Maine” (90). At stake in the debate over these boundary lines was control of the lucrative fisheries in the region (90). Here, Prelli examines how maps and graphics were used selectively by both parties to influence “how the gulf’s features were seen and disposed the attitudes of those who saw them” (91). In doing so, Prelli explores the idea of “visual taxis,” or how visual artifacts may be implemented in the strategic structuring of an argument “for maximum persuasive effect with particular, targeted audiences” (92).6 As Barton and Barton and Prelli emphasize, selectivity is clearly a large component of visual and material representation. Turnbull too agrees that while the map cannot possibly account for or “display all there is to know about any given piece of the environment,” for a visual representation of space to be deemed a map, it “must directly represent at least some aspects of the landscape” (3).
Scale and Projection
In addition to understanding selectivity as a component of cartography’s epistemic capacity, projection and scale also shape how the map conveys particular meaning. Maps rely on scale to “bring the world-view to manageable proportions” (Dorling and Fairbairn 25). Maps that represent the whole earth on a single piece of paper or on a computer screen, for example, are “small-scale” maps, because they convey relatively little detail about a vast area within a small space. By contrast, a map of a city park that portrays “the landscape, other spatial features and their variation in great detail over a limited tract of space” can be considered a “large-scale” map, because a unit of measurement such as 1 centimeter on the map may be equivalent to 5 meters on the ground (25). What counts as large-scale or small-scale more precisely, however, is “subject to enormous subjective individual variation,” and so these terms are not generally understood as conveying precision (25).
The idea of projection helps account for how “the irregularity of the earth’s surface can be precisely addressed on a two-dimensional plane” (Dorling and Fairbairn 25). Barton and Barton describe projection schemes like the Mercator view as potentially sustaining visual distortions that “are embodied in the cartographic space as a grid” (58). Thus, they view the grid as an ideologically-charged representational device that has a propensity toward distortion, despite the fact that its purported goal is to convey accurate models of the terrain by positioning space along equal lines of latitude and longitude (58). Turnbull also points out that the grid is socially constructed and that it does not correspond with a specific physical reality or territory (26). Thus, a generic convention of the map in Western culture is its imposition of the grid onto the landscape it represents. Like Barton and Barton, Turnbull and geographer Mark Monmonier both note the potential distortions that may result from the use of various map projections. The round Earth cannot be projected onto a flat, two-dimensional surface without some level of distortion; as a result, Turnbull says, various projections have been devised to account for this issue (6). While “no one projection is the best or the most accurate,”
