Week 1

Map 1This is a beautifully illustrated "humorous" political map by Kisaburo Ohara of Europe and Asia. It can be found in the book You Are Here: Personal Geographies by Katharine Harmon. I personally find this map intriguing because of its deep cultural meaning through geography. Generally maps are used merely as a form of geographic data; borders, streets, locations, etc... here, Ohara has deconstructed that idea and formed an artistic reconstruction of not only a border forming atlas, but one that shows the political and cultural ties between countries. It shows the people of each country performing a task akin to that of what one may read in a paper of the time of publication (1904). Mainly, this map illustrates the grip of Russia as a many legged octopus spreading its power and oppression over countries near it and entangling them into its powerful web. All together this is a very powerful map showing a vast amount of information in a singular form for all who see it.


Map 2This is a map that was found on the radical cartography web site, it depicts the interstate highway routes a particular person has traveled. There is not much information about this particular map other than it is a "work in progress" and is showing a lifetime of road travel within the United Stated. I personally love this artwork because of its simplicity. Right away you know exactly what this map is showing, even though it has no words, borders, or formal map techniques used within it. It is just a few lines that somehow build a skeleton for a transportation network that is geographically fixed into a continent. For me personally, it conjures an emotional attachment to the highway system of America and a romanticized view of the road-trip on which its used for.

Map 3This map comes from the ASTER (advanced spaceborne thermal emission and reflection radiometer) unit of the TERRA satellite. it can be found on the NASA/JPL website. It is an image that has been colored in such a way to show the sediment loads flowing throughout the San Francisco Bay and into the Pacific Ocean. I find this image to be interesting because it sheds light to the workings of many different geographic features in one area. The Sacramento river dumps its sediment load into the north of San Francisco Bay, here this load is obviously very high. As one works their eye further south they see darker colors appearing, depicting a lower sediment load. One can also witness how these flows move throughout the bay and interact with tidal and oceanic forces, which is quite fantastic in itself. I find all these facets of this map very intriguing and very useful to see how sediment moves and where it might accumulate, which could be very beneficial for coastal communities.

Map 4This is another map from the radical cartography website; made in 1967 by Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin, it plays on most peoples perception that the Sarah Desert is a barren landscape that is void of features that would normally dominate a map. Comical at first, it is an interesting commentary on the human perception of spatial surroundings; humans have a knack for dismissing that which is not important or of value to them, almost writing it into non-existence. This map beautifully exemplifies the quite inner-workings of cognitive spatial interaction and human created geographic importance.