A Reading List on Cartographic Power, Perspective, and Possibility

The shape on my screen did not look much like a map, or indeed, like anything at all. It was unglamorous compared to the glossy displays you could generate using special software and pre-existing maps, stacking layers, running queries to get useful answers to important questions. But this skeletal thing was a map and I had made it from scratch.

Just months into my first job as a lowly geographic information systems programmer, I had assembled data from old survey records, put in the mathematical equations, and written the code. And now the map told me its story. I saw surveyors lugging heavy instruments, as I had for a paper in college once; I knew each data point had been earned under the hot sun. I saw moth-eaten files in dusty archives. I saw the lay of the land, how rainwater would run off, what could be grown, what could be built, what might become.

My own love of maps is rooted in that magical childhood realm where the lines between fact and fantasy blur. Vast landscapes, distant places with beautiful names, exploration, adventure, the whole romance of the thing. All that has an undeniable hold on me still, but putting together this list, I found myself drawn to essays from diverse worlds that challenge how we think about maps and mapmaking.

Horror vacui: Empty spaces on maps were so terrifying to ancient mapmakers that they filled them with decorations, fictional landscapes, and monsters. We moderns miss the beautiful monsters, but what if they never actually disappeared? What if the monsters were always part of the map, part of mapping itself? 

In 1832, Radhanath Sikdar, a gifted mathematician, began his job as a sub-assistant in the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. A monumental project undertaken by the British East India Company, it aimed to map the vast subcontinent with scientific precision—all the better for complete control. Indian “pundits” were employed to travel the land, traverse every kind of terrain, and take accurate measurements regardless of weather and work conditions. Later designated “chief computer,” Sikdar was—the Survey’s former superintendent George Everest suggested—“the cheapest instrument that Government ever could employ in a task of this kind.” He was also the first to figure out that a certain peak called “XV” was “higher than any other hitherto measured in the world.” The Royal Geographic Society promptly christened it Mount Everest, never mind the beautiful traditional names it already had in Tibetan and Nepali.

Maps as instruments of power, shaping reality. Maps as systems of knowledge, refracting our understanding of the world. Maps as objects of fantasy, still charting terra incognita. If you’re ready to explore how cartographic knowledge is constructed, consumed, and contested, welcome to the Map Room. 

What Makes a Map ‘Good’? On the Ethics of Cartography (Nat Case, Psyche, February 2025)

Old maps. Troubling maps. Problematic maps. Maps that are demonstrably flawed. Sepia-tinted hindsight is always clear and often damning. But how do contemporary cartographers deal with ethical issues as they work on their maps now? Maps must be technically sound, yes, Case argues, but they must also be socially and morally conscious if they are not to become complicit in harm to lands and communities. 

How can I tell if a map I’ve made is good or not? One approach is to ask how my map matches accepted standards, but in practice there really aren’t global standards, and the standards that do exist tend to be about uniformity rather than excellence; they go for “acceptable” rather than “good.” I’ve heard people say things like: “It isn’t a real map if it doesn’t have a north arrow and a scale,” but this is akin to the argument that it isn’t a real essay unless it follows the high-school five-paragraph essay format. 

Middle Earth (Kurt Hollander, Aeon, May 2013)

“My true north.” “My north star.” Have you ever found yourself uttering expressions like these? North appears to be the most common orientation for all contemporary maps. Does it have to be, though? According to Cristóbal Cobo, Ecuadorian astronomer and geographer, maybe not. Hollander presents Cobo’s case for east: “the very word orientation comes from the Latin oriens, which means east, or sunrise, while ‘disorient’ means losing direction, losing one’s way or, literally, losing the east.” Is the Sun a better reference point than Polaris, the North Star? Will the simple act of turning the world map on its side solve a whole lot of problems? 

In 1569, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, the first to mass-produce Earth and star globes, devised a system for projecting the round Earth onto a flat sheet of paper. His “new and augmented description of Earth corrected for the use of sailors” made the Earth the same width at the Equator and the poles, thus distorting the size of the continents. Although Mercator created his projection (still used today in almost all world maps) for navigation purposes, his scheme led to a bloated sense of self for the northern countries, located at the top of the map, while diminishing the southern hemisphere’s sense of size and importance.

The positioning of the northern above the southern hemisphere, and the distortion of their true size on most maps, has divided the globe into simplistic binary oppositions: First versus Third World; civilised versus primitive; developed versus underdeveloped countries. 

Arctic Wayfinders: Inuit Mental and Physical Maps (Michael Engelhard, Terrain, March 2019)

My grandparents and those of their generation would give directions that went “go north-north-west until the eight-and-a-half paddy,” and so on. My father can still find his way out of any random place he is dropped into. And here we are, armed with little more than left and right and a GPS. This lovely essay offers a term for a phenomenon I think of as a kind of expanded proprioception: “literacy of place.”

In the Inuit of the Arctic, this ability reaches almost superhuman levels. Once condescendingly described as mere “instinct,” their skill is the result of an extraordinary attunement to nature, collective knowledge, and disciplined practice—and like their traditional parallels elsewhere, of astonishing creative intelligence.

The rare Inuit driftwood maps of Greenland’s Ammassalik Archipelago could be fingered under a parka or inside a kayaker’s hatch, in rain, fog, or polar night. Washed overboard, these charts would float. Their carved nobs and notches—capes, islands, and inlets of that sea-riven stretch—embody a passable fringe close to shore. They ascend one side of the artifact and descend the other, as if north did not matter. A man named Kuniit whittled these memory-sticks before in the 1880s his small, mobile band met the first Europeans. In their sculptural plainness, the burls condense ingenuity. Touching the dear objects like worry stones or rosary beads must have been reassuring to any storm-tossed soul. Now employed to teach 3D printing and digital modeling, the technique of tactile visualization likely has been around for millennia.

Counter Mapping (Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, Emergence Magazine, February 2018)

Across the world, geographies and fields facing an imbalance of power have developed resistance techniques, and the field of cartography is no exception. Terms such as “critical geography,” “radical cartography,” and “counter-mapping” describe such methods. 

Starting in the late 1700s and keeping at it for over a hundred years, the United States government seized over a billion and a half acres of indigenous land, erased the traditional names and assigned different ones to places and peoples, and restricted people to reservations by executive order. This essay describes the work of a community of A:shiwi (Zuni) elders and tribe members who have “set out to remember.”

“Modern maps don’t have a memory,” says Jim. “For me, the whole landscape around here is home. I have patterned languages that help me to remember how I get from one place to another. I go to my field in the summer. I collect wood in the fall and winter. I may be pinion picking or going to collect tea. . . . This whole constellation of what makes up a map to me has always been far beyond a piece of paper.”

To outside eyes, what is perhaps most haunting about the Zuni maps is that they confront us with “not-knowing.” They present us not only with the stories and myths that we are not privy to in the Zuni worldview, but also with the disorienting realization that many of us have forgotten the earth-based stories and myths of our own places—or that we never had those stories to begin with.

A Map of Radical Bewilderment (Daegan Miller, Places Journal, March 2018)

“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes,” said Henry David Thoreau in Walden—and I was in. Best known as a nature writer, Thoreau was also a stellar land surveyor with “as many trades as fingers.” In the summer of 1859, he was hired to survey the Concord River in Massachusetts, and supply the answer to the commercial question: “What is the best use of a river?” 

A transcendentalist took up a compass, and cartography took a stand against capitalism, “to protest the privatizing of the public goods that ought to benefit every living thing.”

Over the next two months, Thoreau spent 34 days on the river, often accompanied by his friend William Ellery Channing. He sounded the bottom in hundreds of places—stopping every thousand feet over a distance of more than 25 miles—and saw with his mind’s eye the river bottom from the side, saw its gullies and hills. He also plunged into the town archives, searching out maps he should consult and local citizens whose long memories he could mine for crucial information. At the end of the project, he took his 33 pages of detailed notes and boiled them down to a single oversize chart. His neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson was in a huff over what he saw as wasted time spent away from the true work of writing: “Henry T. occupies himself with the history of the river, measures it, weighs it, strains it through a colander to all eternity.” 

Nightfaring & Invisible Maps: Of Maps Perceived, but Not Drawn (Lucía Jalón Oyarzun, The Funambulist, July 2018)

When the world grew impatient with improbable monsters, it erased them from the maps and settled for blank spaces. Was it an act of honesty or one of erasure? What else was erased in the act? Oyarzún is concerned with the “remainder (that residue or excess left over while looking for a mathematically precise division of the real),” not to drag it back into the realm of the visible, but to accommodate its presence. Drawing concepts and examples from philosophy and literature, this essay creates a liminal space for “invisible maps.”

Carl Nilsson Linnæus published his Systema Naturae in 1735. He proposed a system of hierarchical classification of the natural world built upon the division between the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. In the first editions of his work, there was a section within the animal kingdom division called Paradoxa. It held everything that did not fit elsewhere. It was mostly populated with fantastic creatures: the unicorn, the satyr, the mermaid and the phoenix, as well as the pelican. This category disappeared in the sixth edition of the work published in 1748. The modern era demanded clarity and sharpness in its limits. While philosophers and scientists alike still treasured the idea of mathesis universalis, (i.e., a universal science of order and measurement modeled on mathematics), the box of paradoxes subjected Linnæus’s edifice to a dangerous kind of tension: It could make it all collapse. 

A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica (Catherynne M. Valente, Clarkesworld, May 2008)

It’s pure chance that brings Nahuel Acuña and Villalba Maldonado together as young shipmates on the 1907 Proximidad expedition, Acuña “barely free of university,” and Maldonado “an untested botanist,” lacking the funds of the former and working as a cook for his passage. They grow into rival Antarctic cartographers, going head to head, drawing parallel maps of the same geographies, Acuña making “phenomenally precise” maps and Maldonado venturing into ever more visionary realms. 

Structured in the form of an auctioneer’s catalog, with alternating auction lot descriptions of their respective and wildly divergent maps, this wonderful World Fantasy Award-finalist short story tests your swaying twin allegiances and sails you gently to its poetic, inevitable end. 

One may only imagine an unremarkable Saturday supper in the ice shadows and crystalline sun-prisms in which Villalba, his apron stained with penguin oil, his thinning black hair unkempt, his mustache frozen, laid a frost-scrimmed china plate before Acuña. Would he have removed his glasses before eating? Would they have exchanged words? Would he have looked up from his sextant and held the gaze of the mild-eyed Maldonado, even for a moment, before falling to? One hopes that he did; one hopes that the creaking of the Proximidad in one’s mind is equal to its creaking in actuality.

Acuña’s journal records only: seal flank and claret for supper again. Cook insists on salads of red and white lichen. Not to my taste.

Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Carolyn Wells