Paper Session: Cartographic Engagement and the Mapping of Place and Space (American Association of Geographers)


CFP AAG Conference, April 14-18, 2010, Washington D.C.
Paper Session: Cartographic Engagement and the Mapping of Place and Space
Organizer: Jörn Seemann, Louisiana State University

As
research topic, maps and mappings within a cultural perspective have
become increasingly popular along the last two decades. While the
cultural turn in cartography has triggered a more detailed and
conscious study of the cultural, political and economic contexts in the
processes of mapmaking, many cultural geographers have followed a
“cartographic turn”, conceiving maps both as material culture and as
powerful spatial metaphors.

However, studies on the authorship and
human agency in mapmaking and how mapmakers engage with place and space
are still awaiting a closer look (Pearce 2008). How do we, as mapmakers
in general and geographers in particular, engage with the
representation of place and space? How do we represent our findings?
How do we convert or translate information into maps and graphic
representations? How can we experience geographies of human knowledge
and place in the map? Where can we find ourselves in our maps?

These
are only some of the questions to be addressed. The session seeks to
explore a wide range of human and humanistic aspects of mapping and
mapmaking (Wright 1942), taking into account that the use of one’s own
drawings and mappings is not only a way of understanding landscapes,
but also an act of “drawing out one’s ‘geographical self’, and gaining
an experience of place and time”(Lilley 2000, p.382).

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
– Cartographic solutions to map place and space
– Historical travel accounts and present-day spatial experience and their cartographic representation
– Insights into the processes of map production
– Production of place and space on the internet (e.g. OpenStreetMap, Google Earth)
– Affective GIS and emotional geovisualization
– Map biographies and the social life of maps
– Community-based mappings
– Maps and art
– Maps and movement
– Restorative cartography
– Indigenous cartographies
– Theoretical reflections on cartography and place

Please
email the title and abstract of your paper (no more than 250 words) and
your PIN number to jseema4@lsu.edu no later than October 23.

References
Lilley,
Keith. 2000. Landscape mapping and symbolic form. Drawing as a creative
medium in cultural geography. In Ian Cook et al., eds., Cultural
turns/geographical turns. Perspectives on cultural geography. New York:
Prentice Hall, pp.370-386.

Pearce, Margaret Wickens. 2008. Framing
the days: Place and narrative in Cartography. Cartography and
Geographic Information Science 35(1): 17-32.

Wright, J. K. 1942. Mapmakers are human – comments of the Subjective in Maps, Geographical Review 32: pp. 527-44.

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