Mapping the space of flows

Considerations and consequences

Bibliographic Data

ID20042413
AuthorsThomas Sutherland (0000-0003-1538-7044, corresponding author)
Year2018
Publication date2018-06-29
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueTime for mapping (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherManchester University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.7765/9781526122520.00018
OpenAlexW2888173415
ISBN9781526122520
LanguageEN
References cited16

For many years now, scholars in geography, as well as other areas of the social sciences, have mounted a sustained challenge to the traditional theorisations of mapping which, in the words of Nigel Thrift (1996: 7), 'claim to re-present some naturally present reality'. There is, as such, little need to further rehearse such debates. 1 At the same time though, what we do need is greater theoretical intervention into the practices of representation that are inherent within mapping, and the ideological precepts by which they are informed and conditioned. Especially in an age of geographic information systems -wherein lies an increasingly stark disparity between the visual appearance of the map itself on one hand, and the numerical data that it claims to represent on the other -the parameters within which such representations are given, and the socio-political consequences of such 'givenness' must be analysed with intense scrutiny. Digital mapping gives us a world through the binding of quantitative information to a set of representational categories: the question that needs to be asked more strenuously regards what other worlds might be possible

Certainty · Epistemology · Geography · Ideology · Linguistics · Metaphor · Metaphysics · Modalities · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Transcendental number · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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