Throughout graduate school I heard tales of the Denis Wood’s outrageous dissertation, curiously titled I Don’t Want To But I Will. Of particular interest are the scathing Acknowledgments, where Denis took his advisors to task. A worn copy of the Acknowledgments was passed among grad students as a bit of intellectual contraband.
But the content was what was most important. It’s a crazy dissertation. It’s about maps, mental maps, getting kicked off a bus, psychogeography, single element veridicality analysis, Europe, cartography, Kevin Lynch, passed-out subjects, Peter Gould, psychogeomorphology, the Shirelles, and the invention of “Environmental a” – a language for mapping. Among other things. It is driving the wrong way down the one-way-street of academia.
The dissertation was printed in a very limited number by the Clark University Cartographic Laboratory. Denis has recently made available a PDF of this never-really-in-print gem. I have reproduced Denis’ comments on the different chapters in the dissertation, along with links to the entire document and each chapter, from his web pages (here).
(via fuckyeahcartography)
“Maps are arguments.” There’s a great Denis Wood interview by Blake Butler worth seeking out in last month’s Believer where they talk about cartography, maps, and Wood’s book, Everything Sings.
If you compare Google Earth and Google Maps, for example, Google Earth in its naked, unlayered form is a bunch of pictures. They’re not maps. You have no idea what you’re looking at, and to the extent that you do have some idea, it’s something you’re bringing to the image. Pictures and words don’t have anything to do with each other. If you look at Google Maps, on the other hand, or an annotated version of Google Earth, which turns it into a map—there’s a label that says this is a desert, this is a mountain, this is a river, this is Kazakhstan, this is Mongolia—well, that’s what makes a map something other than a picture…
Filed under: maps
Update: here’s a PDF of the interview on Wood’s site.
(via fuckyeahcartography)
