# Maps

I have a minor fascination with maps and mapping. I don't have the right geometric way of thinking to be a skilled map maker. Indeed, I wouldn't even say I'm above average at *reading* maps. Yet my fascination remains.

Partially this is simply a reflection of a larger societal fascination. With the rise of the smartphone came ubiquitous GPS and maps. Not every café and restaurant website comes with a menu, but it's vanishingly rare for them not to come with a street map of their location. Mapping as a mental model is ubiquitous, even where it doesn't seem to really fit. David Lankes' "Atlas of New Librarianship" isn't really an atlas in any conventional sense, but it tapped in to a trend towards mapification.

Shannon Mattern's wonderful "How to Map Nothing" is both a reflection of this cultural impulse, and an intervention against it:

> Nothingness, then, for all its presumed vacuity, is a multi-faceted thing: it embodies ways of knowing, it has ontological agency and politics, it has degrees and dimensions. A map of nothing demonstrates that an experiential nothingness depends upon a robust ecology of somethingness to enable its occurrence; and it recognizes the particular representational needs of various cartographic subjects and their potential desires for invisibility, for refusal.

=> https://placesjournal.org/article/how-to-map-nothing/ How to Map Nothing

By "nothing", Mattern of course means "something — that isn't recognised as something that matters". Perhaps the opposite of this is Google's Sidewalk Labs, which attempts to map *everything* and work out whether it matter later.

=> https://reallifemag.com/seeing-without-looking Seeing without looking

Mapping has always been about power. European monarchs were keen to map their territories both in order to control them and to defend them. In the United States in particular, it was surveyers whose presence announced impending seizure of land and massacres of the existing human population. Yet there are other ways of thinking about and using maps that are more generous and positive.

Six years ago, for example, I was utterly fascinated by an article explaining how Australian Aboriginal star maps worked, and how modern highways are a direct descendent of them.

=> https://theconversation.com/how-ancient-aboriginal-star-maps-have-shaped-australias-highway-network-55952 How ancient Aboriginal star maps have shaped Australia’s highway network

I can't find the version of this article I read, but it pointed out that many of the stars in the star maps would not be visible at the time of travel. Novice travellers would be taught a song-story in winter when the constellations were visible, linking the song, the story, and the star map together. Later, in the summer, they could bring the star-map to mind by singing the song, to navigate to the next waterhole or camp ground on the route. In this case, the idea of a "map" is more flexible than one might intitially think. Which is the map: the constellation of stars, the song, or the story? The only reasonable answer is "all three, together".

What, for example, would a map of "thin places" look like? Part of me would love the challenge of creating such a map, but immediately it becomes obvious that this is nonesense. There would need to be a unique such map for everyone on the planet. A thin place is, in Mattern's sense, "nothing". There is no there there. Or rather, there is everything there. The ultimate there, the ultimate thing, the ultimate nothing, the ultimate everything.

=> https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/travel/thin-places-where-we-are-jolted-out-of-old-ways-of-seeing-the-world.html Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer

And if it's all too much and we can't leave the house? If we want some other type of map, a map of something that both exists and does not exist? What about a soundscape map of a virtual forest?

=> https://faintsignals.io Faint Signals

Beats an invasion map.