Cartographers write about Cartography

The year 2020, and the COVID-19 virus presented challenges for communities worldwide. Our Cartography and GIScience international ‘family’ was not immune to the impacts of health issues, movement restrictions and the need to operate altogether differently to what we had done in the past. One of the impacts of restricted travel has been the re-scheduling of the ICA conference ICC2021 from June to December 2021. At the time of writing there’s hope, but not yet certainty that we can meet in person in December.

We thought that we would ‘re-position’ one of the issues of the International Journal of Cartography to provide a way that members of our international community could continue discourse about our discipline during this ‘hiatus’ in face-to-face international cartographic activities.

We have therefore allocated this second edition (7.2) for 2021 to a series of ‘invited essays’, where we invited a number of Cartographers to write about Cartography – personal essays on a particular map, geospatial product, or cartographic issue. We (deliberately) asked invited contributors to write a short, illustrated essay, rather than a formal paper, so as to be able to express the qualities they saw as being important in a particular artefact. These are very much personal reflections.

We were interested in developing a publication that explored what we think about certain maps that move and inspire us – as cartographers and designers, as geospatial scientists and geographers.

When we look at some maps or atlases we sometimes just ‘like them’, or think they ‘work’. They are something special. They can work, artistically, scientifically, technically – or in all three of these areas. We generally limit our appreciation to some ‘note to self’ or by commenting about the artefact we admire to a close friend or colleague, or by a brief comment on social media. We very rarely express our longer-form thoughts about them to a wider audience.

We believe that this Special Issue has provided the vehicle for this to occur, at least for the small proportion of cartographic works on show.

The authors that contributed to this Special Issue of the Journal were asked to pen a personal illustrated essay. We asked them to explain why their chosen map or cartographic artefact works and to provide an analysis of the attributes of the product that they believed make it successful. Here, they were asked to emphasise why it works, even though this was perhaps a personal viewpoint, unsupported by analytical research. If in fact why it works cannot be pinpointed, the author’s personal viewpoint was sought. (Our thinking was that maybe what they were writing about was considered to be like a piece of art – ‘it’s just great, but I don’t know why it works’.)

When compiling our list of ‘invitees’ we were faced with a dilemma: our discipline is one that is rich with well-respected, talented and innovative researchers and practitioners. Looking at what they have done, and continue to do, is truly amazing. We would have liked to invite them all! However, our issue page limit disallowed this. So, we invited potential contributors to enable a representation of the diverse nature of the areas of endeavour in our field, hailing from many parts of the globe, being at different stages of their careers and, importantly for us, as editors, be willing to join us on this journey. We are glad to report that we received much interest and encouragement from invited authors, who were keen to share their passion for maps, in their many forms and applications. The enthusiastic support from contributors confirmed our thinking that an issue like this, with a focus on personal observations of maps, would make a wonderful vehicle for promoting conversations about our field of endeavour.

We believe that this collection of essays will make an important contribution to the contemporary literature on cartography and GI science and promote discourse on these maps and cartographic artefacts. We hope it will generate pleasure and stimulate creativity. Further, that in exploring cartographic work in this way we might encourage similar approaches to other work, acknowledging the value of personal perspectives and opinion as much as scholarly critique. Both have value.