The Map Reader awarded a book prize

We were pleased to learn a few months ago that our recent edited book The Maps Reader (Wiley, 2011) had been selected by the Berendel Foundation for the award of the Cantemir Prize 2012.

My co-editor Rob Kitchin attended a conference, Mapping Humans, at Oxford University last week where the award was officially made. Shown left is the certificate recording the award to The Map Reader and below is a photograph of Rob with HRH Prince Radu of Romania, who formally gave the prize to us.

I was invited to give a talk down in London at a seminar on the Shape of Knowledge put together by David Penfold for the International Society for Knowledge Organization. My talk on 'Mapping Software' was a blend of ideas about cybergeography and code/space. The slides from my talk at available here.

New journal paper in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

A further theoretical argument around cartography as practice and the best way to research mapping has been published in TIBGs as an early view article. It is entitled, Unfolding mapping practices: a new epistemology for cartography, and is co-authored with Rob Kitchin and Justin Gleeson. There is a local version available here. The abstract for the paper is as follows:

"In recent years there has been a turn within cartographic theory from a representational to a processual understanding of mapping. Maps have been re-conceptualised as mappings that ceaselessly unfold through contingent, citational, habitual, negotiated, reflexive and playful practices, embedded within relational contexts. In this paper, we explore what this rethinking means for cartographic epistemology, contending that attention needs to be focused on understanding cartography through the lens of practices – how mappings are (re)made in diverse ways (technically, socially, bodily, aesthetically and politically) by people within particular contexts and cultures as solutions to everyday tasks. We detail how these practices can be profitably examined using a suite of methods – genealogies, ethnographies, ethnomethodology, participant observation, observant participation and deconstruction – that are sensitive to capturing and distilling the unfolding and contextual nature of mapping. To illustrate our argument we narrate the unfolding production and consumption of a set of mappings of so-called ‘ghost estates’ in Ireland, a public geography project that has been covered over 300 times in local, national and international media and that has contributed to Irish public discourse and policy debates."

Key words: cartography; epistemology; ontogenesis; practice; ghost estates; public geography