Boylan Heights and the Poetics of Cartography

Denis Wood's recent book Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas is featured on Places, an online journal of design. In the 1970's and 80's he began working with his students on a "narrative atlas" of the Boylan Heights neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. These maps are unique in that they remove the usual street patterns to reveal the bare details. His map of jack-o'-lanterns from this series was featured here on a Halloween post a couple of years ago.  The Places feature has a slideshow of some of these maps. Here are a couple of examples:

Fences

Traffic Signs

Porch Ceiling Colors

The Places feature includes Wood's eloquent descriptions of the creative process. Here is a quote about making the "Pools of Light" map:

 The usual “efficient” map would have located everything on the street onto a single sheet — that is, different marks for lamp posts, fire hydrants, street signs, trees. Our inefficient map concentrated on a single subject, and, rather than lamp posts, it brought the pools of light into view. No legend, no north arrow, no neat line, none of the usual apparatus. At last, a modernist feel!

That’s when I knew we could write poems in maps, and I began thinking seriously about a poetics of cartography.

 A few more maps:

Intrusions Under the Hill - water, sewer and gas lines

Barking Dogs

Other maps include a map of power lines titled "Squirrel Highways", a mailman's delivery route, a diagram of the distance and direction that rent money travels to absentee landlords, wind chimes, viewsheds, and a bunch of others. The slideshow can be seen here.

Bizarre Map Challenge-Vote Soon!

The Department of Geography at San Diego State University is hosting the Bizarre Map Challenge. This challenge is open to high school and college students. Bizarre refers to "maps that are strikingly out of the ordinary." The top 10 finalists were selected this week and the 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes will be announced April 27th. Subject matter includes personal ads, Thai formation skydiving records, French North American settlement patterns, staycation destinations and opinions about health care. Some of these maps are large files and can be slow to download. I made lower resolution images of some of my favorites.

Here is a map of California where the spacing and color of the county names is used to reflect physical geography. Letter spacing is tighter in the mountainous areas to give the illusion of topography.

Next is the "earth in reverse" - a map that uses a reverse color scheme, making the highest mountains look like the deepest parts of the ocean and vice versa. The map is also flipped so that south is up and west is to the right.

Finally, a map showing the locations of missed connections in Burlington Vermont from the I-Spy feature that appears in the personal ads of the Seven Days weekly.

Map of the Week- Pumpkins!

Denis Wood, an artist and cartographer has co-written several books on mapping, most notably "The Power of Maps" and "Making Maps." Since the 1970's he has been working on a "narrative atlas" of Boylan Heights, his neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. While the atlas has not been published, there are excerpts on the "Making Maps" blog. One of the most well known of these is his jack-o-lantern map.

The map shows the locations of jack-o-lanterns using an image of each one. The lack of any other detail challenges the idea of this being a map. The author aims to break down boundaries between mapping and art and to focus on the patterns rather than on the specific locations that would be apparent if the streets were included.

The Philadelphia Bike Map Wiki

I was looking for bicycling information for my upcoming trip to Philadelphia when I came across the Philadelphia Bike Map Wiki. This page was created by the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. It allows users to locate hazards, good cycling routes, accidents, construction, favorite bike shops and places where bike lanes are blocked or ignored by drivers or the authorities.

If you click on the angry yellow driver icons you get some truly awful stories about the kind of drivers we cyclists routinely have to deal with. Even in a bronze medal winning community.




There is also lots of good information about places to avoid and good places to go- it's not all negative stuff. I don't know if this wiki has reached City Hall to help improve conditions or the (lack of) law enforcement but at least the cyclists have some good information. Now if I can only remember what info I was looking for originally....

Baltimore Festival of Maps-Final Words

One final post about the Baltimore Festival of Maps and then I will get back to the normal Map of the Week schtick. My last two posts were about the Maps: Finding Our Place in the World exhibit at the Walters. However, this is a festival of maps and that means lots of additional events and exhibits, few of which I had time for after seeing the main exhibit.
I was really looking forward to the Maps on Purpose exhibition because I am a big fan of these type of community mapping projects. After all who can resist this map of the Oakenshawe neighborhood? Every few weeks they change the focus to a few selected Baltimore neighborhoods. My week the theme was "Neighbors". There were a number of displays about personal connections within neighborhoods, some of it based on the Arpanet map from the Maps exhibit. Interesting, but not very mappy. There was one cool map of the Hamilton Hills/Lauraville neighborhood.


The map shows income and other variables by block and is surrounded by pictures, stories and commentary by area residents. This was easily the highlight if this exhibition for me.
By the time I was able to make it to the Mapping the Cosmos Hubble Telescope exhibit I was exhuasted and all I coul do was stare at the pretty pictures. Some explanantion about the color manipulations used to create these would have been helpful but I wouldn't have had the mental energy to absorb it anyway at that point.
Of course there are lots of other things going on outside of the Walters including Borders & Boundaries: The Mason-Dixon Line at the Maryland Historical Society - a display of the original map showing this boundary. I did not have time to see this one but it's there until June 29th. I would also like to get to A People's Geography: The Spaces of African American Life at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum - this exhibit will continue until September 7th so there's still time. We did make it up to the top of the World Observation Level for 387 Feet Above, another community mapping type exhibit. It had a few interesting map ideas but the main attraction was the fab view of the Harbor from the 27th Floor. From up there I was able to map out the way out of town on a busy holiday weekend and with that I said a fond farewell to Baltimore and the Festival of Maps.