A Map is 1000 Decisions and You've Only Made 20: Why your most important layer is the basemap

Keywords: digital cartography, countermapping
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 47

Abstract

Too often in the scholarship of digital mapping, all the hard humanities "work" is channeled toward assembling those new, exciting data layers. The basemap is left as an afterthought. At best, a practitioner might make a choice among several templated color schemes and aesthetics on their platform of choice. At worst, they fall back on the ubiquitous commercial basemaps of Google or ESRI.

For the past two years, RJ Ramey of Auut Studio experimented in flipping that scripted formula and has invested significant time to reconsider every cartographic facet of the basemap for his digital explorations of the early United States as of 1803 and of 1910. In a short presentation, RJ showcases several aspects of the basemap in a forthcoming exhibit, “The Enslaved Naturalist“, developed with the John Mitchell Jr. Program at George Mason University. This basemap better captures the turbulent reality of the early United States, visually re-asserts indigenous nationhood, and resists – successfully or unsuccessfully – the casual transactions cartographers make when we attempt to translate the significance of human beings into pixels.