Chris Perkins

Cultures of map use

Abstract Research into map use has so far largely focused on cognitive approaches and under-played the significance of wider contextual concerns associated with the cultures in which mapping operates. Meanwhile, cartography is being popularised and people are creating and employing their own maps instead of relying upon cartographers. Critical cartography has begun to offer new ways of understanding this cultural and social change, but research into map use has so far not engaged with this critical turn. It is argued that an approach informed by critical cartography is becoming more and more appropriate, stressing the need to rethink map use as a set of everyday activities practiced in real-world contexts and arguing map use is best interpreted using methodologies from the social sciences, employing a mixture of ethnographic and textual methods. Using case studies of community mapping, the mapping of golf courses, map collecting and mapping art, this paper shows how different insights into the nature of map use can flow from rethinking mapping. It is concluded that networks of practice of map use depend upon relations between many different artefacts, technologies, institutions, environments, abilities, affects, and individuals.

Performative and embodied mapping

This article explores how and why all mapping might be understood as performative and embodied, comparing different approaches to mapping as a process and relating these to wider epistemological changes across the humanities and social sciences. The distinctions between embodied mapping and performativity, the ontology of mapping practice, nonrepresentational theory, and an actor-networked understanding are explored, and methodological implications are considered. The emphasis of this article is also on practice: many different mappings are being made and experienced, a diversity deemed unworthy of study by cartographic orthodoxy in the period after World War II. So, the second part of this article charts contexts in which mapping practice might be particularly characterized as performative. The non-Western indigenous mapping tradition is contrasted with everyday Western mapping and its increasingly interactive and mediated practices. The fluid relations between art and mapping are another important context where mapping is embodied, emotional, performative, and also increasingly locative. These contexts of practice are still largely separate from performative theoretical approaches, but a rapprochement between writing and doing is already taking place.

Marketing the 'city of smells'

This article explores how smell might contribute to urban identity, building on the strong links between smell, limbic processing and emotion. It critically examines existing scent marketing, psychology, and urban olfaction literatures, exploring the potential for the marketing of urban places through smell and capitalizing in particular on ambient smells that already exist within a locale. The article makes an initial threefold contribution to theory and practice: (i) demonstrating the current use of smell in city marketing, and the inherent challenges arising; (ii) identifying ways in which smell might be used in future urban place marketing activities, and in particular to more explicitly communicate the experiential attributes of being in a particular city; and (iii) proposing that olfaction may, in certain circumstances, be an effective way of incorporating a more participatory modus operandi within urban place marketing effort. The article concludes with a further overarching theoretical contribution, involving a consideration of place marketing that incorporates non-representational perspectives.

‘It’s a sort of echo...’: Sensory perception of the environment as an aid to tactile map design

The results of an empirical investigation into how visually-impaired people sense their surroundings show that a range of environmental features can be identified using sound, touch and smell. The information gained is relevant to the design of tactile maps, to ensure that an area is represented in a way that is meaningful to the map users.

Social and Political Dimensions of the OpenStreetMap Project: Towards a Critical Geographical Research Agenda

Critical cartographic scholarship has demonstrated that maps (and geoinformation in general) can never be neutral or objective: maps are always embedded in specific social contexts of production and use and thus unavoidably reproduce social conventions and hierarchies. Furthermore, it has been argued that maps also (re)produce certain geographies and thus social realities. This argument shifts attention to the constitutive effects of maps and the ways in which they make the world. Within the discussion on neogeography and volunteered geographic information, it has been argued that crowd sourcing offers a radical alternative to conventional ways of map making, challenging the hegemony of official and commercial cartographies. In this view, crowd-sourced Web 2.0-mapping projects such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) might begin to offer a forum for different voices, mapping new things, enabling new ways of living. In our contribution, we frame a research agenda that draws upon critical cartography but widens the scope of analysis to the assemblages of practices, actors, technologies, and norms at work: an agenda which is inspired by the “critical GIS”-literature, to take the specific social contexts and effects of technologies into account, but which deploys a processual view of mapping. We recognize that a fundamental transition in mapping is taking place, and that OSM may well be of central importance in this process. However, we stress that social conventions, political hegemonies, unequal economic and technical resources etc. do not fade away with crowdsourced Web 2.0 projects, but rather transform themselves and impact upon mapping practices. Together these examples suggest that research into OSM might usefully reflect more critically on the contexts in which new geographic knowledge is being assembled.

Making the critical links and the links critical in golf studies: Introduction to special issue

By any metric, golf is a popular sport and a profitable investment. Despite recent oversupply issues and the mounting critiques of its social exclusionism, environmental resource overconsumption, and the expansionist developmental politics, golf remains—even in an ever-worsening global economic situation—a growth industry. According to a report published by the Golf Research Group, there were 30,730 golf courses and 57 million golfers participating at all levels of the sport in 2003 (Golf Research Group, 2003). In the 7 years since the report was published, approximately 500 new courses have been built annually. While golf industry’s residential sector was hit hard in North America during the recession, golf continued to grow dramatically in the Far and Middle East and Eastern Europe. In 2008, the golf industry generated 53 billion Euros and supported half a million jobs across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (KPMG, 2008). The United States now hosts 6,000 courses, while the golf business turns more than US

The Performance of Golf: Landscape, Place, and Practice in North West England

75.9 billion a year (National Golf Foundation, 2010). Global tournaments, golf celebrities, and various professional tours attract significant media attention and generate advertising revenue. There is a large and contemporary literature around the sport, much of it conditioned by the golf industry. Boosterist golf industry consultancies churn out different justifications and strategies for growing the game; scientific investigations of golfing equipment are regularly published in line with ongoing technological advances in club and ball design; psychological and normative investigations of different training regimes are frequently reported; and there is a burgeoning literature around course design, turf maintenance, club management, and tournament operation. The stars of the game publish autobiographies, and golf journalists report their feats in newspapers, blogs, and biographies. Golf travel narratives sell the relative attractions of different holiday destinations, and the majors are documented in profuse detail. Club histories abound. Although there is an abundance of technical and marketing research on golf development as well as popular literature surrounding the industry, golf has received relatively limited scholarly attention on the part of social scientists and those in the humanities. This special issue of the Journal of Sport and Social Issues (JSSI) is motivated by the

Reflecting on J.B. Harley's Influence and What He Missed in "Deconstructing the Map"

This article instigates critical work on golf in North West England by considering how golfing identities are performed in different places and landscapes. Extensive overview of the geography of the game and intensive case-study interviews and participant observation reveal an interplay between social and personal actions in relation to golfing landscapes and institutional contexts. The author argues for a performative analysis of golf, focusing on the co-constitution of identity, practice, place, and power and concludes that political economy alone is insufficient for understanding the diversity of practice and places that situate the game.

Philosophy and mapping

We never met Brian Harley, nor heard him speak, but his ideas deeply influenced our thinking, writing, and teaching about maps and mapping. His argument that maps function as social texts has a powerful force: after all, maps clearly do much more than simply store spatial data and communicate information. Harley’s writing, along with work by Denis Wood, John Pickles, and Matthew Edney, opened up many routes for map studies beyond the technical, the cognitive, and applied functionalism. This body of scholarship, which we now recognize as ‘‘critical cartography,’’ was important as it helped to integrate the map as a significant object of inquiry back into the intellectual mainstream of the social sciences and humanities.

Mapping golf: A contextual study

Mapping is, at once, ontological and epistemological. It creates objects, is a set of practices, and is also underpinned by ideas associated with different philosophical positions. These philosophies are complex and interwoven, their popularity changing over time and space. Most people hold the common sense view that mapping is a neutral technology describing an objective world ???out there???, but the scientific philosophies that underpin this view are mutable. Different justifications for a rational approach have been employed in Robinsonian cartography, cartographic communication, analytical cartography, behavioral and cognitive psychological approaches, visualization, representation, and realist approaches to mapping. Social-theoretical alternatives to science are also being advanced to rethink mapping. Criticaland humanistic philosophies offer new ways of thinking about the medium. Social constructivist theory, and structuralist critique informed by psychoanalysis, linguistics, and the Marxist dialectic have challenged the power of cartographic reason. Phenomenological alternatives such as esthetics, and hermeneutic approaches have also challenged scientific hegemony, while more recent post-structural approaches imagine mapping as discourse, or power-knowledge. Nonrepresentational theory has also recently challenged philosophical orthodoxies, encouraging a turn toward action, performance, affect, and relational thinking. There is little evidence yet that the contradictions between these philosophical positions will be resolved, or that change will cease.