Reflection Essay: Designs on Signs: Myth and Meaning in Maps
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1 2 3 4 5 6 15 7 8 9 Reflection Essay: Designs 10 11 on Signs: Myth and Meaning 12 13 in Maps 14 15 Denis Wood1 and John Fels2 16 1 Independent Scholar 17 2 College of Natural Resources, North Carolina State University, USA 18 19 20 21 Designs on Signs: Myth and Meaning in Maps has led a charmed if unusual existence. All 22 but ignored on publication, its incorporation into a pair of Smithsonian exhibitions, 23 and inclusion in the exhibitions’ ‘accompanying book’, The Power of Maps (Wood 24 and Fels, 1992), has given the paper a currency enjoyed by few Cartographica articles. Its 25 title in the book, ‘The Interest Is Embodied in the Map in Signs and Myths’, captures the 26 paper’s focus on the interests motivating maps, as well as our conviction that these 27 interests pervaded the map, penetrating to the very level of the marks out of which any 28 map is built. 29 We wrote Designs on Signs during the academic year, 1985–1986. We wrote it in 30 Boylan Heights, in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, where Denis was on the faculty of the 31 School of Design at North Carolina State University and John was spending a sabbatical 32 year. We had met in the summer of 1984. John had spent the previous ten years 33 developing and teaching the core Design curriculum in the Cartography Program at Sir 34 Sandford Fleming College in Ontario, Canada, and he had short-listed several eastern 35 universities as possible sites for his well-earned sabbatical. The key attraction at North 36 Carolina State University was Denis, known to John through the work Denis had 37 published in Cartographica, but the School of Design was well regarded at the time and 38 its Visual Design Program also held some interest for John. 39 It is probably important to say that at the time we met Denis had only published a 40 commentary and four book reviews in Cartographica (Wood, 1980a, 1982a, 1982b, 41 1983a, 1983b). Though he had long been romanced by maps, Denis was teaching design, 42 43 44 Classics in Cartography: Reflections on Influential Articles from Cartographica Edited by Martin Dodge 45 Ó 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 258 CH 15 REFLECTION ESSAY: DESIGNS ON SIGNS: MYTH AND MEANING IN MAPS 1 landscape history and environmental psychology at North Carolina State University – 2 he had been for ten years – and writing about maps was, at most, a sideline. In fact, by 3 1984 Denis had published far more about film – in The Journal of Popular Film 4 (Wood, 1978a, 1979, 1980b, 1980c), Film Quarterly (Wood, 1981a), Literature/Film 5 Quarterly (Wood, 1978b), and so on – than he had about maps; but the reviews he had 6 published in Cartographica – passionate, often intemperate – had definitely struck a 7 chord and not just with John. In 1985 Brian Harley, during his post-banquet speech at 8 the Eleventh International Conference on the History of Cartography, was to say, ‘Nor 9 have we welcomed the criticism of outsiders. When a gust of fresh air blows in – as with 10 the bracing polemics of Denis Wood ...’. 11 ‘Outsider ...’ It must have seemed that way to people reading Denis’ reviews who 12 knew no more about him than his position at the School of Design, but Denis had 13 completed his doctorate under cartographer George McCleary at Clark University, 14 where fellow students had included Borden Dent, Karl Chang and Barbara Buttenfield; 15 and since McCleary had received his doctorate from Arthur Robinson, Denis was 16 anything but an outsider. It was John, despite teaching map design, who was the 17 outsider, for John had come to his position at Sir Sandford Fleming with little more than 18 an undergraduate degree in architecture from Washington University in St. Louis. But it 19 was precisely John’s Bauhaus-orientated designer’s perspective that David Jupe found 20 attractive.1 Jupe was then pioneering the design-based mapmaking for which Sir 21 Sandford Fleming would become famous,2 and John’s background suggested that he 22 would approach map design from an explicitly designer’s perspective, though one 23 grounded in John’s preceding five-year experience as a practicing cartographer in 24 Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources. 25 So we were well matched, an outsider who was an insider and an insider who was an 26 outsider, but had John and his wife, Vicki, not been looking for a place to spend his 27 sabbatical, it’s unlikely we would have met. It’s certainly unlikely we would have 28 discovered our mutual interest in semiology, as Denis referred to it, or semiotics, as 29 John preferred to call it, which emerged during lunch the day that John and Vicki visited 30 the School of Design. Amongst other attractions, the prospect of spending a year 31 discussing the semiotics of maps proved irresistible to John, and the following summer 32 he and Vicki returned to Raleigh, renting a house a few blocks from Denis and his 33 family. Shortly thereafter we began a series of weekly meetings to explore the relevance 34 of semiology to maps. 35 We brought different but complementary commitments to these meetings. For the 36 previous few years Denis had been reading everything by Roland Barthes he could lay his 37 38 1 David Jupe had been Supervising Cartographer in the Cartography Section of the Ontario Department of 39 Geology. In the late 1960s he joined the faculty of the School of Natural Resources at Sir Sandford Fleming 40 College, where he founded the cartography program. John joined the faculty to fill in for Jupe on a 1976 41 sabbatical. 2 42 Fleming students have repeatedly captured the Best Student Award in the American Congress on Surveys and Mapping (ACSM) Competition in Map Design, along with a majority of the Outstanding Achievement 43 and Honourable Mention Awards granted. They have received eleven Canadian Cartographic Association 44 President’s Prizes, and won the CIG Intergraph Award for Computer Mapping five times. See their website 45 for a complete list of honorees dating to 1981 hwww.geomaticsatfleming.cai. REFLECTION ESSAY: DESIGNS ON SIGNS: MYTH AND MEANING IN MAPS 259 1 hands on, stimulated by a special issue that Visible Language had devoted to Barthes in 2 1977. Barthes in turn had stimulated Denis’ reading of Saussure, Derrida, Foucault 3 and Lacan. Denis’ collaborator, the psychologist Robert Beck, was working along 4 parallel lines and the two had already initiated the work which, shaped by their reading 5 of Barthes’ S/Z Barthes, 1974, they would subsequently publish as Home Rules 6 Wood, 1994. But until John made the connection, Denis had not been thinking 7 about the relevance of his reading to maps. John had been thinking about ways to 8 systematize an approach to the visual design of maps for some time, thinking that had 9 traversed the formalist traditions to which he’d been exposed as an architecture 10 student where the writings of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Johannes Itten were 11 especially important. The 1983 translation into English of Jacques Bertin’s Semiology of 12 Graphics ‘really caught me with my pants down (in the best possible way)’, as John 13 said, and he began searching for kindred thinkers closer to home. At first the search 14 turned up little except for a few pieces by Hansgeorg Schlichtmann and Thomas 15 Ockerse, but it was certainly to bear fruit in the meetings with Denis. Catching each 16 other up, and exploring as our conversations dictated, we embarked on an intensive 17 reading programme in semiotics (Morris, Peirce, Eco, Greimas, Barthes, Sebeok), 18 linguistics (Saussure, Jakobson, Hjemlslev), structuralism (Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Kristeva, 19 Foucault), deconstructionism (Derrida) and phenomenology (Husserl, but especially 20 Merleau-Ponty). 21 Aside from the excitement of the readings, the great attraction of our meetings was 22 their openness. We had no agenda, no plan, no goal, except that of tackling the problem, 23 as we saw it, of how maps worked, that is, how they did what they did. Our only starting 24 points were a profound dissatisfaction with the way maps were treated in the 25 professional – and popular – literatures, and a conviction that while maps did not 26 comprise a language – contra Jim Blaut, Lech Ratajski, Jan Pravda, C. Grant Head and 27 others – maps undoubtedly were composed of signs and did comprise some sort of sign 28 system. Most often the meetings involved the deconstruction of a map or maps that we 29 had brought with us, deconstructions that opened with questions like ‘What’s this map 30 about?’ and ‘What’s going on here?’; questions that worked their way through ever finer 31 interrogations of increasingly magnified map marks; and questions that closed the 32 hermeneutic circle with, ‘So what’s really going on here?’ Weeks later we would return to 33 maps we thought we had squeezed dry, only to wring ourselves through the process yet 34 again, deepening, we hoped, our understanding with each pass. These semiological 35 analyses, these ‘close readings’, became our fundamental method. 36 There really was no one map in which we were particularly interested, and the range 37 we explored is perhaps best suggested by the maps we tackled years later in the meetings 38 that would result in our The Natures of Maps placemat maps, advertising maps, 39 illustrative maps, school maps, maps produced by the full range of sciences, from 40 every discipline, all sizes, and of every degree of seriousness.