Le petit blog cartographique

In these busy times, a coincidence makes me react here. Several sources turned out to be interesting, on the relation between cartography and reality. This relation, despite the fact that it sounds like a flat generalization, could be a good viewpoint on cartography methodology. You’ll find here loosely assembled ideas and more concrete perspectives for digital cartography.

- First element of the coincidence, a post on Catholigauze’s blog, which cites an article from a journalist, special correspondent, about the unreality of political borders. The post places it in a discussion about neogeography and map reading experience evolution.

What’s interesting, is the idea that authors could use the map as a diffusion instrument of their partial vision of reality. The political borders of middle-east countries, inherited from decolonization, are a good example. A map embodies a border, a line wich could be disconnected from the reality of nation’s, people’s, spatial repartitions. This type of map can be used afterwards as a false proof of reality.

Robert D. Kaplan, the special correspondent cited in the post, draws the conclusion that borders of that time (1994) and region are lies, and cartographers liars. The middle-east example is evident, and the Kurd nation easily comes to mind.

- Intervenes here the second element of the coincidence, when leafing through the Atlas of minorities, by Cyrille Suss and Roland Breton. In this book, amply illustrated just as the rest of the collection, one almost can’t find the Kurds. They are cited as minorities of other nations : Turks, Perses, Arabs, and appear marginally on those nations’s maps. One map even shows that the Kurds represent more than 20% of the population of west Iran, but it’s a map of Iran. Am I more sensitized on the “Kurdish question” than the average geographer? Is there an exceptional difficulty to cartographically represent (thus conceive) a real entity but whose boundaries are just a little fuzzy? That’s the obvious answer.

- The third element of the coincidence comes again from leafing through a book aswell (i do that too often, and i literally have piles of “yet to read” books, proof if necessary of the superiority of brick-and-mortar bookstores, where one can walk among classified books). This book is “The Invisible France”, by Stéphane Beaud, sociologist, Jade Lindgaard and Joseph Confavreux, journalists, published by La Découverte.
The authors present the work in an interview (in French) by Daniel Mermet, in his programme on France Inter radio.

Once again, there’s the idea that the reality is poorly known, therefore badly represented. The observation methods, the frames, aren’t adapted to a changing society, geography. The book, written partly by journalists, tackles the general press: sensationalism, bandwagon effect, adaptation to the market (i.e. the largest demand). The result is that the representations of the French society are, according to this book, essentially incomplete. That’s highly credible, in a time when even the national statistics are more and more difficult to map.

Where lies the cartography within this question ?

How to represent a diffuse phenomenon, without assigning it too firm, precise, definitive, solid, features ? Phenomena without clear spatial limits, without precise understanding, worse : evolutives. The present digital cartography seems to be destitute (in this situation), why ? Published maps are always looking as frozen representations, illustrations of a measured, verified reality, why ?

Why the map couldn’t be a tool to unveil the problems, the issues, of a particular question, spatially ? A way to represent spatial hypotheses and questioning areas ?

Several ideas to follow up reflection on this subject :

• The raster representation is already achieving the visualization of diffuse phenomena quite successfully, and could by inspirational. Some topographical maps of Switzerland are already using this idea by introducing transparent aerial maps as a background.

• The research in “sémiologie graphique” has to be developed on representation of incertitude and fleetingness.

• The synthesis map is preferable than the simple statistical map to represent imprecise realities.

A book about that precise question : “Geographic Objects With Indeterminate Boundaries”, P. A. Burrough, Andrew U. Frank editors, Taylor & Francis, CRC Press, 1996 (Disponible on Google Books).

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ps : The cartographic “lie” theme is recurrent in the epistemology, and the book by Marc Monmonnier is a classic. The map is inevitably simplistic, reductive, but that can be more or less voluntarily. In addition, the idea of the map as a subjective creation, work of the mind, then artwork, is developed by authors like Alan M. McEachren, and Laurent Grison, and looks like as a major epistemological contribution to me.

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Special thanks to Daan Weigand for his help with the english translation.