A Single Point Does Not Form a Line

A Single Point Does Not Form a Line provides a kind of culminating manifesto for the slow map--arguing that instead of drawing lines and tracing drawn lines, that we make maps of traces. This short chapter provides a launch pad to begin to look anew at cartographies past and maps yet made to find their most resonate and responsible lines.

Criticality

Criticality traces the origin stories of critical mapping while attempting to forward a renewed agenda that sidesteps the baggage of the word ‘critical’. It proposes that the heart of this agenda is in our understanding of how maps disclose and stage information, how maps handle time and liveliness, and the responsibilities of maps and mapmaking.

But Do You Actually Do GIS?

But Do You Actually Do GIS? is the introductory chapter, which sets the stage for the interventions--the five factures--of chapters 2 through 6. Importantly, this chapter suggests that the relatively increasing interests in the mapping sciences in a variety of disciplines is related to the crisis of public confidence in higher education around questions of utility and relevance.

Attention

Attention draws forward these historical accounts to the present moment of fixation on digital media. This chapter argues that ignoring the rapid pace of mediatization is disastrous for a community-engaged mapping impulse.

Movement

Movement takes up an issue that transcends digital and critical invocations of the map: time. This chapter explores the historical development of animated cartography through a Deleuzian and Bergsonian framing

Digitality

Digitality traces the origin stories of digital mapping while attempting to understand the rather artificial ways in which ethics and creative thought is considered separate from technical experimentation. The chapter discusses the site of the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics in the mid-1960s.

Quantification

Quantification re-examines a perennial bogeyman for the critical social sciences, by exploring three underexamined facets of quantification in everyday life: interoperability and propriety, competition and habit, and fashion and surveillance.