Should we remap standard map projections?
In May, amidst an ongoing electoral strategy regarding Canada, a former U.S. president labeled the frontier between the U.S. and Canada an artificial line that had been drawn using a straightedge “straight across the northern expanse of the country”. He suggested that the atlas of the continent might appear more coherent if it were removed.
Scholars pointed out that the border was a product of intricate historical events and a lived experience for millions, though they recognized that there was some truth to his statement. A significant stretch of the dividing line indeed follows a geometric line – and the Americans and Britons who negotiated it had little knowledge regarding the terrain.
This statement underscored the reality that the maps most of us grew up with present a falsely simplistic view of the world – one parcelled into undifferentiated territories that permits no challenge to its supposed accuracy, comprehensive knowledge or correctness.
Academic William Rankin dates this concept to 1700s British cartographers who created “jigsaw-puzzle maps” as teaching aids for the youth from privileged backgrounds. These maps, which represented states with clear-cut frontiers and also functioned as the first jigsaw puzzles, endured as a constant of education for over a hundred years. They persistently affect our thinking today: what began as a geography lesson morphed into a technique for illustrating variability in metrics like average lifespan or economic output, with every nation represented by one data point. “In my view that causes real damage, not only to how we understand those states, and to our comprehension of inequality,” says the expert.
A Call for Transforming Maps
Various voices are now calling for a mapping revolution. Recently, researcher a Dutch geographer launched an initiative to “Emancipate Maps”. He proposes to replace the nation-focused perspective with an approach that emphasises mobility and cultural ties. Or as he puts it, to swap the figure bearing the globe, struggling under the weighty globe, for the swift deity – the swift messenger, messenger between worlds.
This geographer specializes in continental frontier regulations and human movement, which is routinely depicted in atlases using sweeping directional lines evoking a hostile advance (for some viewers, recall a classic opening sequence). “The impersonal, massive arrow is primarily the perspective of the state,” he argues. “It stresses the supposed sameness of the nation and the special status of crossing the frontier of non-natives.” In response to such criticism, a key EU agency has swapped the menacing arrows on its data presentations with less alarmist – though not entirely objective – scaled dots, and many schoolteachers have vowed to modify the graphical representation in their classrooms.
Adopting Alternative Geographic Ideals
Meanwhile, the Yale scholar proposes the science of maps to integrate different principles. Both the collection and visualisation of information are subjective human activities that need analysis, he notes. Rather than aspire to objectivity, neutrality and rigid separations, those who create maps ought to welcome indeterminacy, subjectivity variety. His volume, titled a critical work on geography, features geographic illustrations that challenge the dominant narrative.
One illustrates European and American exploration over 500 years beginning in the 1400s, not by showing where flags were planted, but the places they found that had no prior human settlement. These totaled “a few dozen islands and extensive ice fields”.
This is enlightening concerning both how much of the globe civilizations had already occupied by that period, and regarding the actual discovery that happened after that. This stands in contrast to a historical chart of North America currently on display in a major library's exhibition, which portrays aboriginal areas as vacant areas, “to give the idea that they were deserted and ready for taking,” says a principal historian of old charts.
The Role of Community Mapping
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