Maps in the Humanities and Social Sciences

MAPS HAVE AN IMPORTANT PLACE IN SCHOLARLY writing. Historians, sociologists, and other humanists and social scientists often write about territories and neighborhoods, about global disputes and local conflicts, and about causes and correlations involving areal differences, regional clusters, and other spatial patterns. By helping readers visualize regions and comprehend relative distances and other geographic relationships, maps amplify an author's sentences and paragraphs. After all, a two-dimensional stage may be more efficient than a one-dimensional trail of words for recreating and explaining a two-dimensional event. And symbols spread across a map can more effectively communicate the details and structure of neighborhoods, landscapes, and battle zones than words alone. Military strategists and urban planners need maps, and so do scholars whose subjects have any geographic aspect.

But not everyone who should use maps does. I am perpetually perplexed by the work of geographers who seem to have little interest in employing maps to communicate, interpret, or explain. At times, I ask myself if these colleagues are really practicing geography. And often it is clear that they aren't. Yet, as the holder of a Ph.D. in geography and a faculty position in a department of geography, I am often both pleased and puzzled that many noncredentialed geographers are doing interesting geography in other academic disciplines. Scholarship is not bound by the labels we use to mark territory at universities; nongeographers should practice geography if they choose, just as geographers should feel free to contribute to other social sciences, philosophy, the humanities, computer science, or statistics. Indeed, the domain of geographic scholarship is not only too broad for the meager community of researchers trained in the discipline, but also too important to be limited to people with geography degrees.

The misuses of maps amaze and even delight me. The map is a robust medium, and even bad maps may communicate, albeit crudely and inefficiently. That noncredentialed geographic scholars may seem compelled to use them attests to the map's inherent role in "earth writing" — the literal meaning of "geography." But it is astonishing that careful writers who have spent considerable time planning, sculpturing, and polishing their prose often have little appreciation that mapping, like writing, can be done lucidly and elegantly. Helping the conscientious scholar create and use visually efficient, aesthetically satisfactory maps is my goal in this book.

This chapter begins with a brief commentary on the limitations of verbal discussion and on the neglect of cartographic illustration in master's and doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences. It then examines location and spatial pattern as elements in scholarly work, and the consequent need for maps.

WORDS AND MAPS

As National Geographic has demonstrated for decades, maps and other pictures help explorers share with readers their insights and discoveries about both large and minute parts of the world. Humanists and social scientists are explorers, too, and many are geographers in spirit if not in disciplinary affiliation. Because their explorations touch several aspects of place and space, maps can have an important role in their writing. For instance, the literary scholar focusing on Dickens needs to develop and share a broader, more concrete knowledge of the scale and structure of nineteenth-century London than Dickens's classic novels provide. Similarly, the medieval historian might need to know and communicate not only the locations of fortresses and monasteries, but also the theologically influenced cosmological-cartographic world view of twelfth-century nobility. And the student of Napoleon needs to appreciate and explain the effects of the terrain and climate of the Russian steppes, as well as the tribal diversity and economic resources of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. The list of non-credentialed geographers is long and includes the anthropologist, the archaeologist, the art historian, the economist, the literary scholar, the political scientist, and the sociologist.

Like a writer for National Geographic, an academic explorer needs to appreciate the marvelous capacity of the eye-brain system for processing pictorial, two-dimensional data. Photographs and other pictorial illustrations allow the reader to see what the explorer saw, at least from an insightfully selected vantage point. The reader can form mental images that foster comprehension and understanding. Scholarly pursuits often call for more complex pictures, such as the spatially meaningful arrangements of abstract symbols on maps and statistical diagrams. These images help the reader see how the academic explorer has organized, processed, analyzed, or interpreted observations and measurements. The author who relies solely upon words may hobble the reader by obscuring facts and hiding information.

Consider two examples from the work of military historian, naval officer, and sea-power advocate Alfred T. Mahan, whose writings include the two-volume Sea Power and Its Relationship to the War of...