I gave a lecture for Michael Shank’s Ten things class yesterday. I laid out a road map for taking a thing and unpacking it.
I offered examples from my own work with maps. But in the lecture I worked closely with Bruno Latour’s excellent thesis (which pulls together work by S. Alpers, E. Eisenstein and W.M. Ivins) from his 1986 article “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with the eyes and the hands,” in H. Kuklick and E. Long (eds) Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present Volume 6, London.
Begin notes…
A map.
Where do we begin with something so practical, so ubiquitous, so mundane? Where do we begin with something so utterly defined and black boxed that we tend to forget the complexities entangled within it? The aim with Michael Shanks’ course Ten things – science, technology and society is to understand how things work to hold society together.
Lets begin with the most basic questions.
For me these usually have to do with the key ingredients of the world—space, time, materiality/matter and action/force (I said “agency” in class but it too has its black box in anthropology and material culture studies).
These may seem like strange ingredients to start with but they will help us begin to unpack something as incredibly complex as a map.

Space—where is a map?
• It can be of a place.
• It can represent a landscape.
• It can present a site.
Can a map be somewhere?
• Yes. It can be held in a hand.
• It can rest on a desk.
• It can be placed in a book.
• It can be placed in a box.
So a map which translates space has the quality of being mobile.
This connects with its materiality/matter—what is a map made of?
• Paper, cloth, pixels and so on.
• What qualities do all these things share?
• They are all flat.
• They all have two-dimensions.
Time—when is a map?
• Can a map have a time?
• When was it produced?
• A map can translate something of a place at a specific time.
• They can be placed in a sequence.
• Mapped space can transform.
This connects with action/force (agency)—what does a map do?
• Maps can transport something of a place at a distance. Below are several maps of Greece and we are viewing them in a classroom in Palo Alto, California!
• Maps help you get about a place that you may never have been before.
Why are they able to go this?
• Because they translate the material world, 3-dimensional space into 2-dimensions.
So, having taken into account these basic questions relating to—space, time, materiality/matter and action/force (agency), we can say that:
• Maps translate something of space and time.
• They are flat.
• And they are mobile.
The point: a map allows someone to represent a place, transfer it to somewhere else while maintaining something of the reality of that place in two dimensions. Wow, this is an incredibly powerful ability. But is there more to the map? Did maps always have this ability? As a thing, what else is gathered here? Lets go back to one of the basic premises of the class as posted on the website: “things gather together relations and forge connections between disparate and heterogeneous entities, forms and experiences.” Or something like that.
One way to get at the concept of the “thing as a gathering” is to question what qualities allow my thing, a map, to perform in this way? And one way to tease out these qualities is through comparison. Let’s take a historical one.

This map of Athens, Greece by George Wheler dates to the late 17th century.
• The elements of the map are extremely roughly sketched.
• The visual elements of Wheler’s map are arbitrary and inconsistent.
• Can one navigate with this map?
• What does it do?
• The visual elements correspond to numbers which enumerate the monuments of Athens.
• The map is a list.
How does this differ from this recent archaeological map of the Athenian acropolis?

Portion of a map of the Athenian Acropolis
• The qualities are not rough so they are accurate.
• But what is accuracy based upon?
• Measurements on the ground must correspond to measurements on the page.
• To get this one must have linear perspective.
• What about the visual elements?
• They are not arbitrary, but optically consistent.
• The scale of the map can be modified without transforming its internal properties.
But a map cannot maintain this by itself. It has to be multiplied. But how do you do this? What is so important about multiplying a map?
Answer: you increase the likelihood of its immutability.
But how does someone multiply a map in the 2nd century AD? Copying a Ptolemaic map is not the same as copying text. One could copy the Ptolemaic map by hand but pretty soon inconsistencies would begin to manifest themselves and by the time it travels via a few instances of replication it becomes very different from the original. Replicating a map is not the same as replicating a text. For accurate replication one needs graven images—enter the printing press.
One should not overlook the importance of linear perspective plus the printing press.
For Latour this combination provides the basis for the scientific revolution, which was not a revolution of a more rational mind, but rather it was a revolution “of the sight.” It was a revolution in how people looked at the world. Indeed, when it comes to science, archaeology, history, etc. “books can now carry around with them the realistic images of what they talk about” (Latour 1986, 11).
A second comparison of a map by William Martin Leake (1777-1860) of the Bronze Age citadel of Tiryns and a more contemporary example.


Because a place can circulate beyond the local circumstances of the Greek Argolid through exact copies one can now accumulate many inconsistencies side by side relatively cheaply. In so doing “the contradiction between them at last becomes visible in the most literal sense” (Latour 1986, 12).
Beyond reproducing an original one can now build upon a previous map by superimposing subsequent ones. Here we encounter a template to standardization. In the case of archaeology we now have a basis for dealing with sites and monuments on the land. These advantages should not be overlooked because they provide a basis for building certain types of knowledge. They provide a basis for professionalizing fields (on this point refer to some of my work: Witmore, C.L. 2004 “On multiple fields. Between the material world and media: Two cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece” Archaeological Dialogues 11(2), 133-164.).
Likewise, by the late 18th and 19th centuries maps have become the most powerful articulation of power possible (Latour 1986). During the Napoleonic wars Britain and France spent huge amounts of money on standardizing geographical knowledge and improving the accuracy of maps. One can now mobilize space and time differently and the world would never be quite the same.
A person, let’s say an officer, on the ground in Paris can have an accurate representation of how to deploy troops and move them over a land mass, while all the while knowing what lies over the next hill. Another comparison is in order.

This map of the Greek Peloponnesus was published with Edward Dodwell’s A classical and topographica tour through Greece during the years 1801, 1805, and 1806 which was published in 1819.

This the map produced my the French Expédition Scientifique de Morée (1829-1831).
In this map thousands of man-hours of triangulation, calculus, squaring and measurement with theodolites, sextants, plane tables, hundreds of geographical engineers, French troops and so on all are gathered together.
From here we may begin to ask other questions. What other connections do maps have? How do we enlist the help of maps today? What about the medium of a map as a mode of engaging with the land? Any hikers in the group?
Imagine walking through a valley without a map.
• What other qualities of place does one key into?
• One might follow a trail? Yes.
• But what if you are lost?
• Climb the nearest mountain to get your bearings? Yes.
• What if your in the middle of dense forest and there are no views?
• Can you imagine a situation where other senses might come into play?
• With the map there is so much that one doesn’t pay attention too.
• Without the map one engages with the world in a very different manner.
• Of course we have the memory of dealing with maps and perhaps this influences how we move about a new land.
• The point is that a map directs and enhances certain senses while it dulls others.
• With a map people look at the world in a particular way.
• In this way one might legitimately think of maps as sensory prostheses of the human body.
End notes…
http://metamedia.stanford.edu/projects/MichaelShanks/944