There and Back Again: Iowa in Middle-Earth Landscapes

Keywords: cartography, design, landscapes, personal geography
Abstract Type: Poster Abstract

Abstract

This project creates a unique cartographic product to communicate the landscape of northeast Iowa. This project utilizes a J.R.R. Tolkien-style symbology to emphasize the unique physical geography of the region and demonstrates the personalized geography and mental map of the cartographer’s hometown. While most of Iowa’s geography is characteristic of the upper Midwest with flat plains and gently rolling hills, these three counties are part of the Driftless area. Never covered by ice during the last ice age, the region's karst topography, deep river valleys, forests, and bluffs stand in stark contrast to the rest of the upper Midwest and to most people’s conceptions about the state of Iowa. The Tolkein symbology, created by John Nelson from ArcGIS Living Atlas team at Esri, was imported into ArcGIS Pro and applied to the selected boundary, municipality, watershed, and woodland cover layers of Allamakee, Clayton, Dubuque, and Delaware counties in Iowa taken from the Iowa Open Geospatial Data Server. It is meant to invoke the physical landscape of Tolkien's Middle-Earth that often mimics the landscape in this region. As a personalized geography of the cartographer’s home region, certain towns and physical features were selected to reflect aspects of the landscape that were significant to him and his sense of place. The Middle-Earth design also invokes images of the Shire, which reflects the cartographer's sense of home in this region too.