Ricardo Padron’s piece on “Mapping Imaginary Worlds” made me think about several things:
- cartography is much broader than a simple academic discipline
- cartography is not a craft or a drawing skill
- mapping is not just “drawing maps”; mapping is also about making an argument and what is more interesting is that this argument can be very beautiful
- mapping is also about making our way in the world; this way can be a physical landscape but it may also express some abstract concepts such as: emotions, ontological and epistemological issues, scientific notions, literary landscapes
- the most important conclusion is that all maps are in fact maps of imaginary worlds. All maps are abstractions. An author selects some elements of the landscape according to his objectives. Thus, there can be bad maps of physical landscape and wonderful maps of imaginary worlds.
Finally, cartographers can use patterns of imaginary worlds to express real physical landscapes. For example, take a look at this map of St. Petersburg (source: http://teachingmissjen.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/stpetemap.jpg):
If you’ve read Dostoyevsky ‘s “Crime and Punishment” you can almost see Raskolinikov wondering through the streets. You can also use Illustrator and transform this city into another imaginary world.
Historia Computabilis 