My very early experience with mapping is to be trained to memorize assorted topographic and administrative maps, if they are accounted as the basic form, on the geography and history books. Then, mapping to me for a long time meant the factual information provided by national authorities in stable, map-like sheets of books. Not until the popularization of smartphones approximately 10 years ago, did I have the chance to use the map apps on the smartphones, like Baidu Map, where I could operate the digital maps to navigate and to record my traces. And later on, when I was studying as an undergraduate, the concept of Big Data prevailed among academia, so that even some humanity disciplines are active to harness the fancy methodology. I was majoring in Art History then, and conducted some research on historical geography, to find out the life courses of certain ancient artists, for example. One of the impressive researches, which is quite fresh then albeit customary today, is to visualize the spatial trajectories and social networks in a dynamic map through collecting all the information appeared in the artist’s works. Here you can view related researches.
The descriptions above are how mapping functioned before in my perception, which, of course, is far from reaching the climactic efficacy as is put forward in “The Agency of Mapping”:
“The capacity to reformulate what already exists is the important step. And what already exists is more than just the physical attributes of terrain (topography, rivers, roads, buildings) but includes also the various hidden forces that underlie the workings of a given place. These include natural processes, such as wind and sun; historical events and local stories; economic and legislative conditions; even political interests, regulatory mechanisms and programmatic structures … In visualising these interrelationships and interactions, mapping itself participates in any future unfoldings”.
In this sense, mapping is not merely the auxiliary tool, but a comprehensive, visual-based, and prophetic methodology. And the three steps of mapping referred to as “fields”, “extracts”, “plotting” appear quite inspiring to me, where the inside idea of “de-territorialisation” and “re-territorialisation” reminds me of “deconstruction” and “reconstruction”, which are the key concepts of postmodernism. It thus gives the mapping as a methodology the rebellious streak and reinterpretative freedom, which is starkly different from the previous mapping as a tool or substance at rest.
However, what puzzles me is that since the definition of mapping has gone so far, to what extent it is connected with the original “mapping”, which is close to my narratives in the beginning, so that it is still entitled as mapping. Apparently, there are some prominent changes already. On the one hand, Mapping becomes more participatory and decentralized, since it is not only the medium to convey physical information by authorities anymore, and everyone is empowered to enter the mapping and interpret the accessible information on their own. But in the meantime, mapping remains enclosed and exclusive to the data collectors, since the core of mapping has transferred to provide a complete narrative, which means all information displayed should serve the subjective interpretation, as is mentioned “maps are essentially subjective, interpretative and fictional constructs of facts”. Mapping seems to form a new interpretative hegemony based on the data collection. Therefore, when we are encouraged to shift the attention from the physical information to the subsequent interpretation, there is also something we need to be cautious about.
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