Episode 121 - Wednesday - Week 23 - Get out your Globe
Hello and welcome to Kramer’s Eye!
The micro podcast that helps you look at the world with fresh eyes.
This is episode 121, and this I am looking at maps.
Now first off, let’s think about why you’d make a map in the first place.
The oldest maps are made by hunters, charting the best places to find their favourite animals.
These are maps which tell you where to go, what is the ‘place to be’ - similar to today’s maps of Disneyland or the free tourist maps provided by any self-respecting city centre. Maps for navigation. Extremely useful - this has got humans all over the globe.
But there are many more functions of maps, including one of the oldest ones: the cadastre.
Cadastral maps charts the locations and sizes of land, of property.
Here the map is not a guide on where to go and what to find there, but about setting boundaries.
This is where my land ends and yours begins.
Now rights to property, and the ability to protect it, has long been seen as essential to economic growth. Why work the land if someone else can come and claim your harvest? Why build and maintain a house when someone more powerful, important, richer can bully their way into it?
Some would say property boundaries are the beginning of civilisation - others, that this is where all the trouble starts.
And the same goes for other boundaries. Many, for example in the Middle East, are heavily contested.
And this is why it’s dangerous to take maps at face-value. They don’t just tell you where to find stuff- they also speak volumes about the choices, convictions, and sometimes agenda, of their makers.
The first choice every map maker has to make is one of orientation. North? South? East? West? Or something in between that makes the map fits beautifully on a page?
And then there is another, even bigger problem. You cannot translate the earth, a globe, 1-on-1 to a 2-dimensional surface. If you don’t understand that straightaway try wrapping a piece of papier around an orange. It simply won’t work.
Yet most of our dissemination of information is by way of 2-dimensional surfaces - whether through books, posters or screens.
What to do? Well, for one, don’t go around saying ‘my projection is the best projection’, which is what Peters did in the 1980s. He rode a wave of social activism to promote his projection over Mercators, which, despite still being prevalent, had been denounced as early as the 19th century.
One good thing which came out of this is a brilliant scene in The West Wing, where C.J. sits through a presentation by activist cartographers.
But it also resulted in the American Cartographic Association denouncing ALL projections, and issuing the following statement:
WHEREAS, the earth is round with a coordinate system composed entirely of circles, and
WHEREAS, flat world maps are more useful than globe maps, but flattening the globe surface necessarily greatly changes the appearance of Earth's features and coordinate systems, and
WHEREAS, world maps have a powerful and lasting effect on people's impressions of the shapes and sizes of lands and seas, their arrangement, and the nature of the coordinate system, and
WHEREAS, frequently seeing a greatly distorted map tends to make it "look right",
THEREFORE, we strongly urge book and map publishers, the media and government agencies to cease using rectangular world maps for general purposes or artistic displays. Such maps promote serious, erroneous conceptions by severely distorting large sections of the world, by showing the round Earth as having straight edges and sharp corners, by representing most distances and direct routes incorrectly, and by portraying the circular coordinate system as a squared grid. The most widely displayed rectangular world map is the Mercator (in fact a navigational diagram devised for nautical charts), but other rectangular world maps proposed as replacements for the Mercator also display a greatly distorted image of the spherical Earth.
Basically: ditch your large wall maps, and get out your globe.
I must admit I don’t own a globe, but it is now definitely on my wish list.
So what do I take away from all this? Other than the knowledge that the desire to set boundaries is (almost) as early as humanity?
To always try a different perspective.
From now on I will turn maps around, view them from different angles. Same for any work of art, whether your own or someone else’s.
Stuck in your creative process? Hang your work upside down for a week. Or but it on the floor and look down at it from above.
What do you notice now that you hadn’t noticed before?
These cartography battles also makes me wonder how much the division of wealth between north and south, on a global, national and local scale has to do with our preference for North oriented maps. It’s not crazy to think that we associate higher with better.
All the posh neighbourhoods in Rotterdam are situated North of the River - same with most of London.
And then there’s the North of Italy versus the South.
I wonder what all of this would have been different if mainstream maps had been oriented differently.
It’s probably hard to ever know for sure, but when you can do is this. Take a map you’re quite familiar with and turn it around. What do you notice? Does this changed perspective change your perception? How?
Do let me know using the hashtag #kramerseye on Instagram - and I’ll be back tomorrow with more on maps in ART.
Until then, have. A magnificent Wednesday, bye bye