
Advice from a Geographer: Put Away the Map - hownottowrite
https://undark.org/article/book-review-bonnett-beyond-the-map/
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elvinyung
Deleuze says "make a map, not a tracing." Here the map is the tracing, because
mapmakers in this sense are intent on capturing the territory and the raw data
in the finest fidelity, rather than capturing the essence of the territory.
(It's arguable that the former is a prerequisite for the latter, but it might
also be arguable that focusing on the former makes you lose sight of the
latter.)

This article is also reminiscent of _Seeing Like A State_ , which is quickly
becoming my favorite book. The book notes that maps (and map-like devices,
like censuses, even systems of measures), again prove to be an imperfect
device for capturing physical or social reality, failing because the territory
changes too much too quickly.

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omnimus
Thx for the book tip. People dont often mention Deleuze here lol.

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OnlineCourage
As someone who has hiked and canoed extensively in far flung places with and
without maps - I can unequivically say that maps can be amazingly useful
representations of the world or they can downright kill you with misleading
info depending upon when they were updated and how often the landscape
changes, as well as the just general quality of the map.

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icc97
Doesn't the downside kind of outweigh the upside?

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growlist
I don't see anything particularly new here - the ideas described seem like
fairly standard post-modernist dismissals of quantitative geography. Great fun
to study at undergraduate level and gets you out of the lecture theatre, but
for usefulness I'll stick with science.

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unit91
> To that end, he shows us places around the world — from a garbage city in
> Cairo to an urban park in Helsinki, from the underground tunnels of Tokyo to
> a traffic median in Newcastle, England...

So if I don't know where those places are, I should find out by...?

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klodolph
> So if I don't know where those places are, I should find out by...?

Advice from a commenter: Put away the headline.

Out lives are saturated with headlines. We see them in cars, subways, and
airplanes. We access them with our phones, computers, and GPS devices. There
are headlines of deep space and of the topography of the deepest ocean floors.
Then there are the headlines of us — of our genomes, of the cognitive
landscape of our brains, of the web of neural connections that allow us to see
and think and act. Our faith in the headline as a true representation of the
article, and a reliable metaphor for experience and the concepts of modern
life, is exercised every day, largely without question.

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jillesvangurp
Easy to forget there's a difference between models and the reality they try to
represent. All abstractions are leaky.

In the case of maps there are all sorts of issues that relate to projections
and size, the 2d nature of maps vs. the 3d nature of lots of places, editorial
decisions as to what is relevant and what is not, etc. There are a lot of
political subtleties as well, historical changes, temporary changes, etc.
Also, continental drift and gps accuracy are a thing; especially in earthquake
sensitive regions.

