All semester we have played with the idea of what a map is. Over time we have expanded the concept to include battleships, baseball stadiums, and closets. But if pushed, how would we define these documents we have been studying and producing these past months?
Oxford American offers the following definitions of the term, which might serve as a baseline for us.
noun
1 a diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads, etc. : a street map | figurative expansion of the service sector is reshaping the map of employment.
• a two-dimensional representation of the positions of stars or other astronomical objects.
• a diagram or collection of data showing the spatial arrangement or distribution of something over an area : an electron density map.
• Biology a representation of the sequence of genes on a chromosome or of bases in a DNA or RNA molecule.
• Mathematics another term for MAPPING.
2 informal dated a person’s face.
While my personal favorite would be “a person’s face” (and I hope to bring this back in vogue), 1(c) “a diagram or collection of data showing the spatial arrangement or distribution of something over an area” seems to best capture the spirit we have been affording the idea of a map.
However, after reading You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination this week I was thinking that even though this description is nicely ambiguous and allows us great play in deciding how to categorize maps, it lacked what I have come to think of as an essential quality of a map-its referential information system. All maps are inherently self-referential in that its symbolic entities are symbiotic with each other. But they can also be referential to other maps and contexts of knowledge. For example, I started making a list of the themes of some of the maps in You Are Here. Within the first couple of chapters it contained visualizations of such disparate subjects as bodies, virtues, dreams, politics, values, economics, ambition, class, and tradition, among many others.
Essentially, the Oxford American dictionary doesn’t seem to hold a place for some of the maps in You Are Here, such as the morality maps or dream maps. Nor does it capture the crux of what maps are capable, how they can represent information that is wholly unreliant on place. So I’m working on a brief, descriptive definition of a map given all we have experienced. So far what i have come up with is “a document used to symbolically present the referential placement of entities,” but I’m not sure I’m happy with that. For starters I’d like it to be in English.
What do you all think?
Ah Ken, you are dancing about architecture. I for one will hold out the Supreme Court justice’s definition of pornography–I know it when I see it. Or how about that scene in the movie “Jaws” when Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider are comparing scars and telling the tales behind them. Yes, we need the symbols, and we need a space to place them. And sometimes those spaces tell us about the relationships between each piece of information. My best friend in high school became a specialist in the workings of the brain–at least that was her research when I last talked to her. She had to work very hard to explain to me how neuro-transmitters work on both electrical and chemical processes to create the synapses that are our thoughts. That memories are not stored as entities in our brains, but that certain ideas trigger the recreation of the synapses that were formed when the action or thought was first acted out. I am afraid I cannot do justice to her science, but the thought of symbols on a map recreating the connections both in the brain and between the symbols on the map has a certain charm. We are hampered with primitive tools–chemical inks on paper or electronic signals inside a computer–in our attempt to recreate these synapses. Or are the maps a way for me to share my synapses with you? Or for us to share Ortelius’ synapses? If I were attempting to define maps, I would start with the idea of shared connections, both between the objects on the map and between the map maker and the map reader. The I would address the idea of distilling and reducing information into a handful of symbols. Face it, by the time we finish we will need a document the size of the OED just to hold our definition. Or maybe we could just draw a map. . .
I would put my whole idea in here but I can’t post a picture in a comment. I expand this in my blog ( http://notthatmapsheet.typepad.com/not_that_map_sheet/2007/11/maps-are-a-wond.html) but how about a map is a non textual representation of ideas. In reality aren’t all pictures Maps?