Follow the Purple and Teal Brick Road

My colors were purple and teal.

What is a map? How do Krygier & Wood define a map? How is a map related to the world it depicts? Why do we make maps?

Krygier and Wood define a map as being a proposition. They state that maps proposition you with something about the world, essentially as though each map is trying to convince you of a different reality. I’m not sure that I entirely agree with this “maps are not representations” mentality, but I see how they could be either representations or propositions. For example, a map that is meant to display data over a geographical area (for example, the pin oaks maps), could be more a proposition than a representation; the creator of the map is trying to convince you that that’s where the pin oaks are. But it is also a representation of the data that they’ve collected; that’s what the map is for. Otherwise, they’d just give you a giant table of longitude and latitude coordinates for the pin oaks. Additionally, maps like Google Maps, ones that aim to replicate the layout of the real world as closely as possible, are much more representation than proposition, in my opinion. Maps do their best to give us an otherwise impossible perspective on the world. We make maps to help us in our understanding of the world; humans are visual creatures, and having maps to show us the big-picture helps us to understand concepts, such as data (the pin oaks) or navigation. (220 words)