By Maria Sherwood Smith, 30 October 2025
On 26 September 2025, UniSIG came together online for a presentation by Joy Burrough-Boenisch on ‘Dealing with maps in scientific and scholarly texts’. The talk was based on the presentation Joy gave last year at METM24 in Carcassonne, and she had updated it to include some recent cartographic debates.
Joy started by going back to the basics, introducing us, via an article by geographer Caitlin Dempsey, to eight elements that make up a map. The most important ones for the ensuing presentation were the map legend, scale bar, north arrow, and inset (locator) map. Joy reminded us that the convention of north-oriented maps is not self-evident or universal, referring to medieval Christian maps (east-oriented – a worldview crystallized in the very concept of ‘orientation’) and south-oriented early Islamic and Chinese maps. A more recent south-oriented map is the McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World, from Australia, published in 1979.
Having armed us with the basic knowledge we needed, Joy invited us to consider an array of maps she had been presented with in her editing practice. All of these maps were in need of improvement to make them clear for the reader. Often they lacked one or more of the basic elements discussed above. We considered maps with no legend, for instance, or where the legend assumed knowledge that the reader might not have (e.g. an unexplained ‘NAP’ in a map of the elevation of the Netherlands: a participant enlightened us with the correct English translation ‘Amsterdam Ordnance Datum’). Many maps relied on unexplained assumptions, like a colour-coded system of gradations from green (good) to red (bad), or a system of darker colours to indicate intensity, without providing a clear legend. In some cases, simply changing the orientation of a map or adding a scale bar could immediately make the map more informative.
In other cases, Joy had uncovered more complex issues, such as a map referring in the legend to 17 sites, but only actually showing 13, because ‘some symbols overlap due to the proximity of the sites’. Here Joy had advised the author to use a ‘callout’: a line from the symbol in the map to further explanation in a text box. Other delicate matters Joy has had to advise on included a map of the Wadden Sea and adjoining countries, in which the German state of Schleswig-Holstein had been shown as belonging to Denmark. In all, the message was not to take maps at face value when editing.
In the final section of her talk, Joy discussed the broader issue of the political implications of maps, neatly summarized in a quotation from El País (English edition): ‘Maps are not innocent drawings’. Here Joy touched on recent moves to replace the Mercator projection traditionally used in cartography with the more realistic ‘Equal Earth’ projection. The latter shows countries and continents in their true proportions: Africa, for instance, is much larger than the Mercator projection would suggest. But new maps can also reflect more sinister political aspirations. Joy pointed to the inset map that Chinese researchers are obliged to include in all their maps of China: when enlarged, this apparently ‘innocent drawing’ can be seen to designate Taiwan and other islands as Chinese territory, in contravention of the UN-agreed boundaries.
All in all, Joy’s presentation gave us plenty of material for discussion. At one point we considered the differences between a ‘contour map’ (terrain indicated using contour lines) and a ‘relief map’ (visual representation of terrain). I feel that Joy’s talk as a whole filled in the gaps in my very blurred and sketchy concept of a map, and made me more aware of maps’ potentially serious implications.
|
Blog post by: Maria Sherwood Smith |
