Abstract
A common description of a map is a two-dimensional graphic representation of spatial arrangements, mainly a static document, offering a range of lifeless geodata, surface areas and maybe also thematic attributes. The function of maps, from this perspective, is limited to location – what is where. As a result, both movement and temporality are put in the background, stripping cartographic representations of their temporal depth, spatial dynamicity, and of their potential and power of storytelling devices. This is the starting point of the edited book Motion in Maps. Maps in Motion. Mapping Stories and Movement through Time with theoretical resources and insights from mainly geography, (historical) cartography, cultural geography, history, digital humanities, and history of knowledge.
The book highlights that there have been some ongoing concerns throughout the history of mapping: how to visualize narratives, flows, processes, and ideas that have been deemed “unmappable”, or impossible to map due to their subjectivity, locational fuzziness, instability, and randomness of their content. Simultaneously, many attempts are made to present narratives (e.g. wars and sieges, natural disasters, building campaigns, and miraculous events), and movement (e.g. traffic flows, pilgrimages, migration patterns, discoveries, weather changes, and trade routes) “in” the mapped landscapes or territory. A key argument is that motion and change in time and space occupy a central position in mapmaking through the times.
The authorś overall aim is to show, study, and discuss some of these attempts, and thereby the multiple and diverse relationships that exist between maps and cartography, on the one hand, and narratives and motions on the other.
Mobility, mapping, flow, and time appear in many versions. The concepts are heterogeneous and analysed through seven readable chapters, accompanied by a list of figures and diagram, presenting several case studies. Each case, with only one non-Western example, is analysed in relation to relevant historical contexts, and the “employment” of these movements in maps. Furthermore, production of consumption is always connected to flows of material and intellectual resources, and this is also part of the book's perspective.
Another vital element is the insights from critical cartography and is the awareness of the strong link between cartography and narratives. Two aspects are obtained from Sébastien Caquard and William Cartwright, “on the one hand, maps have been used to ‘represent the spatiotemporal structure or stories and their relationships with referential place’; on the other, both maps and mappings have narrative potential themselves”.
By introducing a rich variety of maps, (online) story maps, deep maps, the grid map, world maps, flow maps, history maps, the reader is offered a deeper understanding of maps content, function and potential: a map can reflect various types of movement, maps reveals an intellectual movement expressed through changes, errata, and the introduction of new ideas, and additional, both the map and the users were and are in motion.
Djoeke van Netten shows how the mapmaker of Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula (1648) has firmly taken possession in several political, scholarly, and scientific debates: the map provides a Euro-superior, male-dominated, optimistic, and pro-Dutch – if not anti-Spanish – worldview. By a close “reading” of two-story maps from the early seventeenth century, Bram Vannieuwenhuyze, argues that these documents combine the representation of geodata with the genre of den so-called news or history prints, and that these topographical layers are inextricably entangled. By reading his chapter, we get a guideline to a meticulous and multidisciplinary analysis of story maps. From the perspective of transport historians, the flow maps analysed by Zef Segal, certainly is interesting. He shows how flow maps were developed to visualize effects of modern transportation and individual movement patterns on their societies, and the later trend shifts were flow maps were utilized to state the power of imperialistic trade and commercial, and later in the Nazi German context became a significant component in propaganda. Radu Leca analyses the ways in which intersections between historical narratives and cartographic design shaped the spatial imaginary of Japanese audiences by being employed by varying ideological positions. Ferdinan Ormeling presents renewed analytical possibilities enabled by the digitization of maps. This allows scholars, with a keen eye, to discover any changes that have occurred in the map of a specific area within a specific time frame. The five map-examples show different stories; they are embedded in changes of infrastructure, colonialization, territorial conflicts, emerging tourism, national movements, and urbanization. Establishing a dialogue between social media and mapping endeavours is the project of Jørn Seeman, by opening a debate on the potential of social media platforms for historical studies, and on how to visualize stories and processes. This by discussing a research-project which map the stories told in Facebook groups engaged in the place-related history of Muncie, a rust-belt town in the American Midwest. Mark Monmonier identifies a set of distinctive types of static graphic strategies, of change-of-state maps in his reflective essay. These maps give a graphic portrait of change from one spatial pattern to another, to show the old and the new, of the before and after. By producing a typology of narrative and motion maps, he completes the book.
The book is result of thoroughly research, well written, and richly illustrated. With these qualities in mind, one might ask if and if so how the subject relates to the history of transport or would interest JTH reads? My answer is yes! The book gives theoretical apparatus, different methods for analysing maps in relation to motion, time and stories, and we are invited into several detailed close-“reading” of maps, which might serve as good cases in teaching. It is however a pity that the print-quality of the many illustrations, doesn’t give the original maps fully credit.