Mapping Other (Geographical) Realities

Abstract

To ‘everyday consumers’ of information from a popular media the ‘not-real’ is experienced by almost every time they read a book or magazine, turn on a television, watch a movie or access information via the Web. They are instantly taken to another world, which may well be the very reason that they use these devices – for ‘escaping’ their real reality. They may see access to media as a way to escape reality, to explore and experience ‘other’ worlds and to participate in non-daily activities.

This is something that is just an attribute of main-stream media consumption.Professional designers and cartographers use different representations of geography to make it easier to navigate, like metro maps which depict the geography ‘underground’ with minimal links to what is happening above ground London Underground map. Also, maps of ‘nowhere’ – those that depict places made famous in popular media, and ‘visited’ via books, comics, film, television – been produced to represent these not-real geographies.

This paper addresses how ‘other’ geographies are represented, generally from outside ‘main-stream’ cartography. It begins by discussing maps and the representation of place and space. Then it looks at how maps are used to understand spatial relationships. This is followed by an overview about how maps are used or incorporated into popular media. The use of spatialisation and how other geographies are represented using the map metaphor is covered next. Finally, issues about extending cartographic representations to accord with the use of interactive and integrated media to visualise other geographies is addressed.