Open to Disruption by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826519849
Goodreads: 18697841
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2014-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

8

Getting to the Dark Side of the Moon

Researching the Lives of Women in Cartography

Will C. van den Hoonaard

Little did I suspect that a research project conceived by my enthusiasm for maps would lead me to embark on a convoluted but very instructive journey through the occupations inhabited by women cartographers. Unlike many other travels, however, its precise start eludes me. I also find myself not knowing when the journey will actually come to a close. Can it already be twenty-one years long? What explains its long duration? There is an intermingling of my own interests and talents, of the nature of the research itself, and of the new, contemporary demands of interdisciplinary scholarship. All three elements have contributed to the protracted length—and ultimately to the complexity—of my research.

This chapter locates the original impetus for my project and explores the long period of gestation in a field that required me, as a former cartographic editor, to abandon previously held concepts of cartography in order to view the field in a new way. Because I was totally unfamiliar with contemporary aspects of cartography, I began my sociological work from the margins of the “map worlds” and gradually worked toward the center of that universe. This working from the margins allowed me to take in a broader, more relaxed picture of the structure of cartography and the social dynamics of its incumbents. It also gave the international community of cartographers an opportunity to become familiar with me and my particular research interests. All this, however, took time. The final outcome of that research—Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography (2013)—describes the world of women map makers, beginning in the Golden Age of Cartography in the sixteenth-century Low Countries and ending with tactile maps in contemporary Brazil.1 As developers of resources that allowed early map ateliers to flourish through marital liaisons, women had an unmistakable role. Other women cartographers, working from the margins, produced maps to record painful tribal memories or sought to remedy social injustices in the nineteenth century. In contemporary times, one woman produced a revolution in the way we think about continents, likened to the Copernican revolution. Several others created order out of the disorder of the lunar landscape after a three-hundred-year accretion of confusing naming practices, while still others turned the art and science of making maps inside out, exposing the hidden, unconscious, and subliminal “text” of maps. What all these outstanding women map makers share is their interest in social justice and making maps work for the betterment of humanity. Map Worlds set itself the task of recovering these women from obscurity. It also recounts the experiences of women within contemporary cartography. Oftentimes, the world of women cartographers seems to be hidden, much like the so-called dark side of the moon, but as every thinking person knows, the invisible side of the moon bathes as equally in the sunlight as the one that faces us.

Opening Scene: The Start of the Journey

I clearly recall a warm and pleasant evening in May 1994, rifling through the glove compartment of my car, looking for city maps.

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