On maps, storytelling, and us.

I love maps, for they are portraits of places. Maps of the Puget Sound, the Chesapeake Bay, the eastern shores of Maryland, the San Juan and Rocky Mountain National Forests, and the Four Corners region evoke memory and emotion at our house. Maps are reflections of who we are and what’s important to us, representative of the stages on which we live our personal screenplays. Maps are history and politics and boundaries and colonialism and love and war and perspective and language and food and music and terrain. Maps are three dimensions deprecated to two (if you could call their beautifully loaded, semiotic 2D renditions a deprecation). Maps are national identity. Maps are the other. Maps are storytellers. Maps are us.

In his book On the Map, Simon Garfield expounds:

In other words, maps hold a clue to what makes us human. Certainly, they relate and realign our history. They reflect our best and worst attributes – discovery, curiosity, conflict and distruction – and they chart our transitions of power. Even as individuals, we seem to have a need to plot a path and track our progress, to imagine possibilities of exploration and escape. The language of maps is integral to our lives, too. We have acheived something if we have put ourselves (or our town) on the map. The organized among us have things neatly mapped out. We need compass points or we lose our bearings. We orient ourselves (for on old maps, east was at the top). We give someone a degree of latitude to roam.

Lella Vignelli praised the intricate, beautiful details of Swiss Topo Maps from the 1930s in a video clip played by Edward Tufte at his last talk in Seattle.

The United States Geological Survey now has its maps digitized, available online. How 3D-printing and laser cutting reinterpret our portraits of place: Cutmaps, Wood Cut Maps, Below the Boat, and Laser Cut Maps. And how maps are all about context.