"Mapping Beyond Cartography" - to Situated Cognitive Maps

"... the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities has been partially overtaken by an ‘object turn’ in which relations between things are not primarily considered in spatial terms." pp. 53-54.

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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

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SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

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"Tuters (2010), for example, calls for ‘post-locative practices’ that move beyond a ‘mannerist situationism’ to emphasize ‘situated’ rather than located media. This requires replacing ‘the concept of geographic location as the core concept of locativity, with the more relational notion of proximity, not only in relation to place but also in relation to matters-of-concern’ (2012: 275). This shift is advantageous in that it allows that locative media (or some successor form of it) might address relations and phenomena that are not fixed to terra firma, but it also suggests that space has become completely irrelevant, that geographic maps might, as Tuters suggests, be replaced by cognitive maps (2012: 274). p.63.

"... even in a world without the surefooted sense of grip that cartography once provided, I want to suggest that there are other ways by which to find some sense of orientation. In unfamiliar territory and without a map, the wayfarer draws on the tales of travellers who have gone before, surveys the shape of the landscape with an eye for landmarks, builds cairns where there are none, and eventually learns how to triangulate between them and make some kind of map –whether cognitive, sketched or plotted. In a situation in which the maps we increasingly inhabit subject us to a form of colonization, there seems no alternative but to ‘map or be mapped’." p.383.

"For Edward Tufte, computer-generated visualizations of data are simply the latest iteration of a brand of ‘cognitive arts’ that includes maps, alongside mathematical projects, scientific charts and diagrams, and even MRI scans (1990: 40)." P.173.

"Indeed, for Fredric Jameson, post-modernity’s ‘un-map-ability’ is its key defining characteristic: ‘this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world (1991: 83). This crisis of representation in cartography calls for new kinds of maps; for Jameson, a form of ‘cognitive mapping’ that might allow the individual to locate themselves not just spatially, but economically, culturally and politically." p.82.

Daniel James Frodsham, April 2015. Mapping Beyond Cartography:The Experimental Maps of Artists Working with Locative Media. PhD thesis. University of Exeter. https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/19185/FrodshamD_TPC.pdf