Space, Culture and Society (SCaS)
Maps and Society
Conferences and workshops
We have been active in terms of hosting meetings, curating exhibitions, running workshops and organising sessions at major conferences.
- Local organisers of the British Cartographic Society annual conference in September 2006, hosted at the University of Manchester. This successful three day conference was attended by several hundred, with twenty-five papers presented.
- Co-organisers of the Mapchester mapping weekend on the 13-14th May 2006, supported with a small grant from Manchester Geographical Society.
- Co-organised, with colleagues from Manchester Computing, of a two-day interdisciplinary workshop on geographic visualization across the social sciences, hosted at the University of Manchester on the 12-13th June 2006.
- Hosted the first State of the Map conference, an international meeting for the OpenStreetMap project, 14-15th July 2007. A very successful 2-day conference with over eighty attendees from the across the UK, Europe and US.
- Curated a new exhibition, Mapping Manchester: Cartographic Stories of the City (PDF) that reveals some of the ways in which mapping is ingrained into urban life. It demonstrates how maps change over time in response to technology, society and economic imperatives, highlighting visually striking cartographic representations of Manchester. It is free to attend and is in the reading room of the Rylands Library on Deansgate until 28th March 2010.
Paper sessions organised
In addition, we are active in organising conference sessions to bring scholars together to examine social and political nature of mapping. For example, at the RGS-IBG annual international conference in September 2006 we organised ‘rethinking maps’ sessions (PDF) in which eleven theoretically informed papers were presented by an international panel of speakers. (We developed an edited book, Rethinking Maps following on from these sessions, with several of the presenters contributing chapters).
At the 2008 RGS-IBG annual international conference we organised three well attended sessions on ‘maps as method’ along with a high profile evening plenary discussion on the ‘future of the map’. The lively discussion between Mary Spence (chair of the British Cartographic Society), Ed Parsons (geospatial technologist for Google) and Denis Wood (writer and independent theorist) was chaired by Chris Perkins and generated an array of questions and comment from the audience. An aspect of the plenary was also the focus for much media interest, with nearly every national newspaper running a story (for example, the Times and the Independent. Chris Perkins was also interviewed for a follow-up story in the Times Higher Education Supplement. We also presented results from our ‘Maps that matter’ research at the conference as a rolling slide show which was displayed prominently on the big screen in the foyer of the RGS building. Lastly, we provided the location map displayed on the conference programme backcover; created by Graham Bowden using OpenStreetMap data (see example).
At the Association of American Geographers annual meeting, in April 2007 in San Francisco we organised a double session on ‘Google Earth as the view from nowhere: the spatial politics of high-resolution satellite imagery’ (PDF) that was very successful with a packed audience. A selection of papers from the sessions, along with other invited contributions, will come out as theme issue for the journal Geoforum in July 2009.
Chris Perkins had a very busy time at the 2008 AAG annual conference in Boston as he co-organised, with Jorn Seemann (Louisiana State University), and chaired three successful sessions on ‘subversive cartographies’. He also chaired two sessions on the social politics of satnav. And as if that was not enough Chris also organised another couple of sessions on golf – his none cartographic passion!
During the 2009 AAG annual meeting in Las Vegas, Martin Dodge co-organised a successful double session titled ‘Is Google Good for Geography: Web2.0 and the Political Economy of User Generated Geographical Knowledge’. A wide range of papers from international speakers were given to a packed room. Martin also participated in a panel discussion on ‘Neogeographers meet Paleogeographers’ organised by Renee Sieber.
For the 2009 RGS-IBG International annual conference, which was in Manchester in August, Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins have organised a double session entitled ‘Mapping Stories: Why Do Geographers Make Maps?’. The aim was to consider the processes underpinning spatial knowledge claims, examining how they can often marry local storytelling to a critical and contextual emphasis on how and why geographers make, and have made maps; and equally why some geographers don’t make maps anymore. We also hosted a nice wine reception for conference delegates at our Mapping Manchester exhibition.
In November 2009 Chris Perkins had a busy time participating at the 24th International Cartographic Association Conference in Santiago Chile. A total of sixteen papers around the themes Maps and Society and Critical Cartography were presented in four well-attended sessions organised and chaired by Chris. He also presented a paper, co-authored with Martin Dodge, on the topic ‘How do we map the geographies of cartography’ and convened a meeting of the ICA Commission on Maps and Society.
In the coming year we are also busy with more events. At next AAG conference in Washington DC, April 2010, Chris Perkins will be presenting a paper in the ‘Cartographic engagement and the social life of maps’ session on the theme of ‘Public cartographies: the remediation of Russian mapping’. We are also organising a session titled ‘Mapping Underground’ at the RGS-IBG international annual conference in September 2010. Finally, Martin Dodge has successfully applied for a JB Harley Research Fellowship in the History of Cartography and will use the award to conduct a spell of primary research in the National Archives in the summer of 2010. The research will focus on civilian mapping of Manchester during the Second World War, particularly focused on bomb census maps and reconstruction plans.
Editorial boards
Martin Dodge serves on the editorial board of Cartographica and Chris Perkins serves on the editorial board of the Cartographic Journal, two of the key journals in cartography discipline. Chris has also recently become the new book reviews editor for Cartographica. In addition, Martin serves on editorial board for the journal Information Visualization that has overlaps with mapping.