Views from somewhere: an atlas of maps
Views from somewhere: an atlas of maps
Anna Lee Steele
Introduction
To make maps is to be human. They shape the way we see the world and ourselves, and while we might exclusively associate maps with the art and science of cartography, humans have always been trying to make sense of where they are, where they’ve been, and where they want to go.There are many maps that we know and love, but to remember the human(s) behind the map is important too, both the makers and the users. All maps are products of specific histories that captured them, their seeming objectivity disguising the subjective perspectives that produced them.
In almost a decade of using and researching maps of many kinds, I’ve moved from cartography to conceptual art and back again in an attempt to learn about how maps have been made and used for navigation, data, belonging, and protest, among a million other reasons. In trying to find some connecting thread between the map-based web and the world, I started collecting all my maps on are.na, a creative research tool, in the hope that some underlying logic or framework might emerge.
This atlas of maps is my first attempt to organise this collection. These maps lie somewhere between the sky and the soil, between the state and the sacred.
Some repackage the status quo into new mediums, while others push back against the form itself. Some visualise scales so large that we would fail to connect the dots otherwise, while others tend towards the stories and connections that would remain hidden—if not rendered invisible—without them. Early on, I learned that world maps form the scaffolding for world views.
As my relationship to the maps has evolved as I’ve grown with them, I’ve begun to wonder if that’s the problem: that we even start with Big Maps that make us think Big Thoughts about Big Concepts in the first place.
What about the small maps, the minor maps, the ones that made me pay attention and simply made me… me? The map may not be the territory, but my maps and I have always been intertwined. I, too, am a map in the making, and the maps are making me.
In the disorienting reality of the 2020s, I’ve also needed another kind of atlas to find my bearings.
This is my atlas of maps. I invite you to explore them: each name corresponds to a mapping project available on the web and in the world. Stay with one, or sit with many. Move between the sky and the soil, or somewhere in between.
More importantly, make your own atlas of your own maps. It is in the mapping that you might find something else, or maybe even yourself.
Top layer (Sky)
Maps of Empires, States, Standardisation and SurveillanceMost maps begin with a view from above. This is for a variety of reasons, the primary one being the perspective made possible by distance—and the kind of abstraction required to map a place from the top, down. After learning from and looking at maps uncritically for years, it was only when I became a researcher of maps that I learned about how mapmaking can largely be divided into two eras: BM (before Mercator), and AM (after Mercator).
While all maps face the fundamental tension of trying to render a 3D space on a 2D surface, accuracy wasn’t necessarily the aim of early mapping. Early maps were made for all sorts of reasons: as much for wayfinding and trade as for cosmology and religious pilgrimage. They were hand-drawn and decorative more than anything else, and their geographical accuracy was less important than the concepts they conveyed.
This changed with the emergence of cartography as an exacting European science in the 1500s, which itself corresponded with the rise of states, empires, and commercial interests that shaped their making in the first place. When the Mercator projection was developed, it was praised as a map that made accurate nautical navigation possible. In the process, however, the projection exaggerated the size of countries nearing the poles and downplayed those closer to the equator. (For example: Greenland appears to be the same size as the African continent, but it is in fact 14 times smaller.)
In its distortions, the Mercator projection shaped perceptions accordingly, replicating global inequalities that remain today. While the Gall-Peters projection emerged in the 1970s to critique this paradigm in what is known to be the “Map Wars,” the move to web-based maps has brought back this tension of projection. In fact, most of the world maps we see online use the Mercator projection, regardless of their content.
As states emerged within the world at large, maps emerged to play similar roles of standardisation and distortion in equal parts. Seeing like a State, written by anthropologist James Scott in 1998, documented the legibility that maps enabled and the regimes of land use, resource extraction, and population control that came in their wake.
In the 20th century, this birds’ eye view has evolved into a satellite. Idealistic histories of earth-observation satellites would have us believe that they were launched for scientific reasons alone, but looking towards the broader history of cartography reveals a cyclical story. As I wrote for Logic Magazine back in 2022, military and commercial interests continue to shape how we see the planet.
Despite all of this, I still can’t help but feel a sense of wonder when I’m given the chance to see things from a bird’s eye view.
I remember how I felt when I watched Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” or the Eames Office’s “Powers of Ten” for the first time, or even used Google Earth on my parents’ desktop computer. They all gave me some version of the Overview Effect, the cognitive shift reported by astronauts after seeing Earth from space, even if they were all made possible by the far-reaching arm of the American empire.
Perhaps it is this fundamental contradiction between the wonder that world maps inculcate, and the cruel processes that they inevitably enabled that still shapes how I see maps today. The Big is, of course, implicated in the small; I have inevitably been shaped by the global processes that shape us all.
- Imago Mundi (600 BCE)
- Geografia by Claudius Ptolemy (2nd Century)
- Tabula Rogeriana by Muhammad al-Idrisi (1154 AD)
- Carta Universal by Juan de la Cosa (1500 AD)
- Mercator's World Map (Gerardus Mercator) (1569 AD)
- Gall-Peters Projection by James Gall and Arno Peters (1885-1973 AD)
- “The True Size of” project
- Google Earth
- Overview Effect
- Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot
- Eames’ Power of Ten
Middle layer(s)
Street-level: Maps of Systems and SubversionThe deeper I’ve gone into the world of maps and their makers, the more I’ve learned about their inherent complexity, and found a landscape as diverse as the forest floor.
In revisiting every map that I’ve ever seen or used over the years, categories have emerged to try and understand their conceptual borders. These aren’t a comprehensive collection: far from it. But they connect the version of me that made maps at a Washington DC think tank to the me that then tried to trace the contours of supply chains and their workers, to internet infrastructures of all kinds, and eventually brought me to the worlds of open knowledge and (computational) poetry. These are the psychogeographies that shaped me, though the processes contained within them have also shaped the world at large.
Most of these maps collected here are digital ones, the product of my ethnographic fieldwork with a mapping community during a global pandemic and the ensuing specialisation that such exposure creates. Some of them replicate cartographic methods, but contain subversive or conversely, strategic data. Others push back against the cartographic form, while others turn a train of thought into a spatially-aware design.
Countermapping is a term that has broadly come to encompass this subversion of the traditional map: for example, to counter the hegemony of the Mercator projection, to critique dominant narratives about a place or people, or to simply stretch the concept of ‘map’ itself. Perhaps all these maps can be divided along the lines of “traditional maps” and “countermaps,” though such lines start to blur quickly as it becomes clear that every map requires projections and trade-offs to create them.
As I’ve begun to make my own maps of a few different kinds, I’ve found myself directly situated at this tension between what the form allows for, and what it inherently forecloses. These maps, more than the maps of either the sky or the soil, are an assemblage in the middle: a rhizome that connects and diverges at different points to create a rich ecosystem we exist within today.
Maps of Realpolitik
- Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative
- Beyond Parallel
- Global Conflict Tracker
- NATO Security Investment
- Reconnecting Asia
Physical infrastructures
- Submarine Cable Map
- Data Center Map
- Satellite Map (LeoLabs and other)
- Colouring Cities
- Flight Radar24
Supply Chain Processes
- Feral Atlas
- SupplyMap
- Manifest
- Little Sis
Knowledge Access
- Open Syllabus
- Open Knowledge Maps
Data infrastructures
- OpenStreetMap
- Missing Maps
- MapSwipe
- Ushahidi
Countermapping people(s)
- Cartographers of North Korea
- Queering the Map
- Palestine Open Maps
- Native Lands
- US Immigration Detention Map
- Universal Corrective Map of the World
- America Invertida
- Cartography of Generative AI
- Atlas of AI
Indigenous Wayfinding
- Aboriginal Songlines
- Micronesian Stick Charts
Mapping poetics
- Diagram.website
- Map of the Internet (xkcd)
- Mapping Meditations
- World Maps In One Try
- Mnemosyne Atlas
Bottom Layer
Soil (the Symbolic, the Self & the Sacred)The deeper I’ve gone, the more the overarching categories in the layers above have started to break down: taking me away from discussions about the forms of the map to the cosmologies and bodies that lie beneath the surface.
Perhaps I’ve gone full circle to the maps that existed before cartography, because everything has become a landscape to be documented these days: a sketch of a friend’s parkour routine, a spiral doodle drawn again and again during a Zoom call, the choreography of public transport, a walk to the park. My inner and outer worlds have been converging in forms I didn’t expect, primarily on the site of my own body.
It is here, however, that I have found one of the most politicised territories of them all.
Particularly since the overturn of Roe vs. Wade in 2022, I have been keenly aware of the political terrain my body represents. My thirties alone have required navigation through a minefield of questions: primarily about the womb and all the places where aging becomes visible on the outside, and from within, understanding an endocrine system that leads 80% of all auto-immune disorders to be expressed in women.
The maps of who controls women’s bodies, who legislates them, and the borders between gender and sex and sexuality more broadly—these are the oldest enclosures of them all, and the most intimate.
Looking up at the maps above ground, perhaps I have internalised the contradiction between “technological overdevelopment and human underdevelopment” that Grace Lee Boggs had spoken of in her 1972 speech. In over 70 years of working with communities in Detroit, it was clear to her that we require new ways of relating to ourselves and each other, ways that don’t replicate old systems with new language.
I wonder if I, too, have focused so much on the technology of mapping that I’ve mistaken it for real social change, which starts within the self.
With this in mind, I’ve turned to the mystics: not for answers exactly, but for other ways of knowing that always seem to start with the body first. But engaging with another kind of body politics has brought other questions to the surface: Do we turn to ourselves when we have nowhere else to turn? Do we turn to the body when control escapes us in other ways?
The answers are unclear. Perhaps for now, I’m tending to the soil of myself, nourished by the stories that seem to map a path towards a greater sense of self, and a respect for the stories that always seem to be cyclical. Maybe in the process, I’m remembering that there is as yet hope for a better world.
- Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown
- Jung’s Map of the Soul by Murray Stein
- Thangkas and Mandalas
- Beauchamp-Feuillet dance notation
- Anna Halprin's movement scores
- Spiral Jetty and Spiral Symbologies
- Cuerpo Territorio (Body Territory)
- Meridian and Body Maps
- Star Charts and Labyrinths
Conclusion
To illustrate maps at all these levels, from the sky to the soil, is not to replicate the hierarchies that put one on a pedestal and stoop the other towards the earth.
The maps I’ve collected here are like my own desire lines, paths made by repetitive movement rather than officially sanctioned routes. These maps reveal versions of myself while foreclosing others, and demonstrate the evolutions and mycelial networks that connect them all.
In 2026, the commons that these maps plot is under constant threat and co-optation: by war cries and genocides and land grabs and pipelines of many different kinds. To render them as layers is not to show them as separated, but as integrated parts of a larger whole, like an ecosystem of thought that requires support and understanding at different scales, at different times.
My maps are like a garden. Right now, I’m in the soil, but I’ve been in the sky and on the land before. I’ll be there again. The atlas of my own maps lies somewhere on the horizon, and I’m getting there, step by step.