A couple of great new posts at the Making Maps blog mustn’t be allowed to go unnoticed.
First, John provides details on the forthcoming sessions at the AAG on subversive cartographies:
To be subversive, is to wish to overthrow, destroy or undermine the principles of established orders. As such subversive cartographies offer alternative representations to established social and political norms. Maps are no longer cast as mirrors of reality, instead they are increasingly conceived as diverse ways of thinking, perceiving and representing space and place which express values, world-views and emotions.
There are 3 sessions planned. John’s own paper is titled “Are maps autistic?” Hmm.
Second, there is a superlong detailed entry by John and Denis Wood about the samizdat Atlas of Boylan Heights. Denis Wood has been working on this project since the 1970s but it has never been published in full form. Parts of it have popped up from time to time or been passed around by hand. Boylan Heights is an area of Raleigh, NC where Denis has long lived.
The valuable thing about this post are the high-resolution maps from the Atlas, the best ever publicly available as far as I know. Here’s the famous “pumpkin map” for example (featured on This American Life in 1998):
