USGS Multimedia Gallery: (Video)--The National Map Users Conference: The Question, What is a Map? Is More Relevant than Ever.

The Question, What is a Map? Is More Relevant than Ever

[Music]

Keven Gallagher: ...of the critically-acclaimed "Mohr", 2006, a Booker Prize winner, John Berger, wrote, "His aerialist's sense of history, his sleight of hand, his animal knowledge of political practice, his silver tact and his cool tenderness make his performance nothing less than Orphic."
01:13

Richard Eder of The New York Times wrote, "Painful and beautiful, Reuss writes with Jamesian complexity about states of mind and character with brilliant understanding and a painter's rich detail."

His most recent novel, "A Geography of Secrets", addresses secrecy in public and private life in present-day Washington. It was named the best book of 2010 by the Washington Post. And Mr. Reuss lives in Washington, D.C.

It's truly a pleasure for us to finish our plenary talks today with a unique perspective from a lay user of maps and geographic data. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Reuss.

[Applause]

02:13

Frederick Reuss: OK. Let me just get my... Ah, OK. I'm a little technology-challenged here.

Thank you for inviting me to come and speak to you today, not as a map-maker but as a map user, and most importantly, a student of and big fan of the U.S. Geological Survey, who have given me not only plenty of material to work with but this opportunity to speak with you.

The little room where I work on the third floor of a house not far from the US capital is L-shaped. I've never seen an original floor plan, but I imagine the house, which was built in 1876, has undergone a few renovations in its time and what today is a six-by-nine-foot notch was presumably part of a larger room, the history of which, given the location and the age of the building, one can only guess at.

03:13

Because the book case is on either side, the space is actually much narrower. My desk is a 24-by-48 piece of three-quarter-inch plywood set into the wall atop an old cast iron radiator that sits directly in front of the window that faces due south and is bounded on the east and west by 5th and 6th Streets and by Independence Avenue and Seward Square.

I have a rear view of the houses on three sides. Fenced wooden lots turned the patch of ground that is the interior of the block and with inaccessible warren of private spaces, the only ground within the block open to the sky.

A variety of trees have been planted, mostly non-native ornamental species. The oldest and largest is an elm that rises out of the lot on the south side of the block and in summer shades the rear of most of the houses along Seward Square. It's possible that the tree is nearly as old as the houses.

04:12

A few residents have built roof decks under its sprawling branches. And from where I sit, they look like the kind of tree fort I used to dream of building for myself as a kid, a place to hide where nobody would ever think to look would find me, at least not without a map... the pirate kind with the skull and crossbones and a code of legend, and most importantly, an 'X' to mark the spot. Not a 'Y', not a 'Z', or any other letter of the alphabet. Not a cross for obvious reasons or a squiggle or a squirrel or a cute little rubrick like a smiley face.

Not even an arrow, which might come under consideration because arrows are cool. And not because they can be used to indicate direction, but because they can be shot into the air and land far away. "Give me my bow," says Robin Hood. "An arrow giveth to me. And where it is shot, mark thou that spot, for there my grave shall be."

05:08

No question, arrows are the fullest expression of romantic things in young children. But on a treasure map? No, thank you. No arrows. Just an 'X'. Two diagonal lines intersecting at a point in the middle: the graphical representation of singularity that symbolizes a precise and unique location. A place.

Even alone and by itself, an 'X' is a point in the map. On a blank white paper it says, "Here." And in relation to an arrangement of lines and shapes, it retains its ultimate function as a final representation of an absolutely singular space.

As a kid hiding out in the tree fort, I couldn't imagine a map without an 'X' on it. A map without an 'X' is entirely pointless and uninteresting because, well, an 'X' is something significant and shows that something is there. And a map isn't just a boring arrangement of lines and shapes but something you use to find interesting places and things.

06:12

Every kid in every imaginary tree fort knows that every map has to have an 'X' on it. And then even a map without an 'X' on it has a virtual 'X' in it because it shows you where you are. You are the 'X', and the 'X' is you. Tree fort philosophy doesn't get any deeper than this.

[Laughter]

Frederick Reuss: Even a map of a faraway place like the Grand Canyon, a place millions have visited, well because it's there. Even a map or a place like that has an 'X' on it, even if the 'X' is in your head and moves with you as you're tossed on the mad white foam of the Colorado River in a raft crashing over rapids with canyon walls towering overhead that reduce the little raft, and the 'X' that is you is something so unimaginably puny that, for reassurance, you imagine what John Wesley Powell and his first expedition was thinking when he was in that exact same place and not strapped into a big neoprene thing with a life vest and screaming tourists but a wooden door lashed together with rope and carrying all the equipment necessary for measuring, mapping, putting an 'X' on the big unknown, a place that until then was only known to the native people who lived there, whose world was about to change forever as a consequence of having been mapped by white men.

07:34

But our young 'X' rushing down the rivers and falling such large thought is still only vaguely aware of how those great topographical surveys were significant and part of the larger historical, cultural, political forces, a way of seeing that it didn't evolve with for centuries, in part in science and philosophy and mathematics, all of which taken together comprise the larger political and historical processes leading the expansion of the new nation, which, geomapping terms was built upon the work of the early boundary surveyors with their compasses and chains.

08:10

People like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, whose first job was an assistant in the survey of Alexandria in Virginia or Mason and Dixon. The ideology of the United States can be seen and described in the landscape. And to quote the late geographer Denis Cosgrove, "The most powerful expression of how the concept of landscape finds political expression in modern nations today is in the topographical map."

The chapters in grade school on Lewis and Clark and the historians of surveying a map in the West begun in 1838 by the core of topographical engineers which included such mythical figures as the impulsive and reckless John Charles Fremont, whose report to Congress contained the map which guided first pioneer settlers into the West, and the later expeditions populated by such larger-than-life figures as King and Hayden, Wheeler and Powell, the one-armed Civil War vet who famously, on August 13, 1869, started down the great unknown, are all part of a legacy that can be viewed as a multitude in a multitude of projections, dimensions and spectrum as an 'X' on a map.

09:22

An 'X', the perfect variable, the place where all maps begin and end... in the words of the English mapper of Western Ireland, Tim Robinson, "the irreducible nub of topographicity."

[Laughter]

Frederick Reuss: In his marvelous writings on the Arlan Islands and Connemara, Robinson points to what he calls "a fourth dimension of cartography," which he says "extends deep into the self of the cartographer." He describes a map as a subjective triangulation of the world and map-making as a one-to-one encounter between a person and a terrain, an existential project of knowing a place.

10:04

"A map," he writes, "is a sustained attempt upon an unattainable goal, the complete comprehension by an individual of a tract of space that will be individualized into a place by that attempt." An 'X' is not something dropped down onto a piece of paper but a reflexive category that reflects the way of seeing and simultaneously of being shown.

As a novelist, I would say this unity of depiction and reflection is also true of any narrative. And if we look at a map as a kind of narrative, a story, then 'X' on a map takes on a dual function of character and narrator, much the same way we could say a character in a book contains these aspects as a projection of both the author's and the reader's imagination.

There is an exhaustive body of learning literature out there which takes this idea and spins it into all sorts of fantastic directions, and our kids, when they discover it, will abandon their own tree fort and take up residence in some Ivory Tower somewhere from which they may never come down.

11:11

The academic fashions that was correcting the literature in the last half-century have also revealed the geography and its subdisciplines.

And it's not my intention to overdraw the analogies between the work of mapping and novel-writing, although I do think there are interesting parallels worth exploring. Rather, I'd like to talk about how maps came to play a role in my work and inspired both the way I look at telling stories and the way I've learned to use and look at maps.

My map story began with a very unusual map. And I need a glass of water. Thank you.

On August 15th, 1942, a Japanese plane made an airdrop over Guadalcanal. One of the reinforced wicker baskets fell behind the U.S. lines and was recovered by Marines from the 1st Marine Division, who had landed on Guadalcanal just one week earlier.

12:11

In the basket, among the letters, candy, encouraging 'Banzai!' leaflets from the emperor, was a heavily-annotated hand-drawn map to estimate the situation, which was passed over to the 1st Division press officer and union historian attached to the Division's intelligence unit, a young lieutenant named Merillat.

The map shows the Japanese Naval victory at Sago Island on August 8th in the top right corner. But even before the annotations could be translated, Lieutenant Merillat immediately recognized another event depicted on the map and drew his 'X' on one of the triangles representing a convoy of three Higgins boats that had crossed from Kukum to Tulagi three days earlier.

He'd been in one of those boats on August 12th and had been forced to abandon it when they were fired on by a Japanese submarine that suddenly surfaced and by a miracle of good luck been chased off by howitzers fired by marines who had been watching them as they scrambled from their position on Tulagi.

13:13

The map, which shows a particular place at a particular moment in time, became a memento in Lieutenant Merillat's Guadalcanal experience and hung in his home in Washington for nearly 60 years afterwards.

It's the map that inspired a different way of looking at maps for me and illustrates what I think of as 'the Rashomon effect', after the classic Kurosawa film, that is the idea that maps contain stories and that these stories vary depending on the point of view of the teller.

This became immediately apparent to Lieutenant Merillat when the annotations were translated. The Japanese described high-speed boats loaded with war material flying the British flag crossing from Guadalcanal to Tulagi.

Merillat as an old man liked to chuckle over that, pointing out that, one, the boats were not only very low-speed, the engine had ceased up on them when he was in them, which is why they were forced to abandon when the submarine began firing, two, the only war material they were carrying was gasoline and some scared press and intelligence officers, including Richard Tregaskis, who shortly after would write the famous book "Guadalcanal Diary", and three, where were the British?

[Laughter]

14:31

Frederick Reuss: Of course, at the time there was nothing funny about it. Merillat describes his terror in his account of the battle, "Guadalcanal Remembered", as did Tregaskis, who was in the boat that swung over to the rescue and who saw, quote, "an ordinarily quite dignified young man jump over from the other boat and landed in a heap wearing white socks," or Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Griffith from the 1st Raider Battalion, who watched from Tulagi and wrote in "Battle for Guadalcanal", quote, "It became evident to each of the spectators that he was witness to the most dramatic of all possible scenes, a literal race between life and death."

15:11

"When smoke began pouring from the engines of one of the boats, there were agonies of disappointment. 'Jesus, our engine's conked out!' a man said in a choking voice. He was crying."

It would later come out that the event was described by Japanese headquarters as, quote, "a desperate attempt by Americans to escape from imperial fury on Guadalcanal to the safety of Tulagi."

Sixty-five years later, framed and hanging on the wall of an old man's house in Georgetown, the map had become a war relic, a time capsule. I asked Mr. Merillat, who had just turned 90, if looking at the map brought back memories. "Oh, yes," he said, "but not what you're thinking. Life and death moments, things like that."

I was a little disappointed. The idea of being so directly involved in such a grand historical event seemed impossible to put aside like that. What does it remind you of? "How uncertain everything is," he said. "And how in close up everything looks different." Then he laughed and he added, "The trouble is, everything looks different from far away, too.

16:18

It took me a while to realize that he wasn't just referring to his personal experience but to perspective and scale in general, the connection between a terrain, in this case that particular day on Solomon Islands during World War II, and the mapping of it, which is merely an expression of a particular experience, a one-to-one connection with a terrain.

There isn't one 'X' on the map but a profusion of 'X's, all of which tell a different story from a different perspective. And this question of perspective, which is as fundamental in map-making as it is in landscape-painting and story-telling, is crucial to understanding what can be distilled from what we call the 'X'.

Whether lines on paper, graphically compiled GIS data on the screen, they are aspects of fact that lie beyond what we think of as empirical evidence, subjective as well as objective categories, each of which has a role in interpreting and presenting what is being seen.

17:18

The 'X' on a map can represent the perspective of the existential insider, the Lieutenant Merillat who sees himself depicted, or the 'X' of the Japanese cartographers whose careful details showing topographical features of the islands and the position and movement of ships in the straits between and is as close to a snapshot of that place in time as is possible, or the 'X's of the admirals formulating their battle plans.

Finally, what about the 'X's on those nine boats, the sunken ships which to surviving families represent a watery grave of a loved one killed in action?

18:00

Maps offer views on a variety of levels but are also, in themselves important cultural artifacts, reflections of their authors. On the macro scale, one might say that the USGS is author of the largest and grandest work imaginable, the Earth itself. At the scale I work upon as a story-teller, the scale of the individual character, maps are more than just a research tool. They are a creative ingredient that help see through a character's eyes and lend coherence and form to their world.

There are fictional places that come with fictional maps... Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, Tolkien's Middle Earth... but I prefer to work the other way around: to extrapolate from the mappings of real places, the world as it is seen through a character's eyes, and sometimes even think of my characters as maps themselves, depictions of the ephemeral inner geography of the self by the equally-ephemeral needs of words.

19:02

Tim Robinson, whose writings as a map-maker have largely defined my understanding of the cartographic art, reminds us that utility of a map resides in its being a conceptual model of the terrain projected onto paper, a representation of spatial relationships, a visual calculus, which is to say, it is something into which one must project oneself, fill in with our own imagined presence.

He sees this imagined presence, the self, represented by the compassed roads which is usually discreetly located in some unoccupied corner but is conceptually transplantable to any point on the map sheet and represents the transfinity of directions radiating from the self to the terrain.

I can't think of a better way to illustrate the beauty of that idea than to juxtapose the most objective of maps, a USGS topographical map, with the most subjective, a map drawn from memory.

20:05

For the past year, I've been doing research for a book set in the region of New Jersey called the Pine Barrens. Actually, since an Act of Congress passed in 1978 proclaimed it as a federally-protected area, it is now officially the Pinelands National Reserve, an area of 1.1 million acres, or 22% of the entire state of New Jersey, and one of the most ecologically distinctive and historically interesting regions on the eastern seaboard.

That it was only recognized as such in 1978, more than a century after the legislation which created Yellowstone, surveyed by Hayden and described by him as "a wonderland," is an indication of how long it took the landscape idea to include places whose natural beauty and significance is a littler harder to see in terms of 19th century aesthetics.

In fact, the Pines Region has never been seen in aesthetic terms at all but has always been a wild swampy backwater unfit for most kinds of agriculture expect for cranberries and blueberries, exploited since early colonial times for its abundant timber and iron ore, and also where the early American industrial revolution had its start in iron forges, glass and paper factories, lumber mills, shipyards, all thriving enterprises from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries, when they began to decline.

21:28

It was Joseph Wharton, the steel baron, whose interest in the area led ironically, pardon the pun, to it becoming one of the largest conservation areas in the United States.

His plans had nothing to do with conservation, however, or even steel, which by that time was being produced closer to the newly-discovered coal deposits in the Allegains. He wanted the water... it was 'X'... and bought up nearly all of southern New Jersey for access in the 17-trillion-gallon Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer, one of the largest, purest freshwater aquifers in the country.

22:06

It took him the better part of 20 years from the mid-1870s to the mid-1890s. His plan was to export it to the city of Philadelphia. When he was blocked from doing so by the New Jersey legislature, he quickly lost interest in his holdings, which were eventually give to the state by his heiress.

In fact, by the time Wharton completed his purchases in the 1890s, most of the industries in the area were already gone. The iron forges, glass and paper factories, saw and whisk mills and the towns and communities that had grown up around them were already disappearing.

During World War I, a number of large ammunitions factories were built, but they, too, were abandoned after the war. The one area that continued to grow was along the coast as the railroads, and then the automobile, opened the beaches to mass tourism and development.

Which brings us to Manahawkin, Stafford Township, Ocean County.

23:04

Today, it's one of the main portals to the New Jersey shore, Exit 63 on the largest state parkway, which feeds onto Route 72 east and ends in Ship's Bottom in Surf City on Long Beach Island.

Ed Hazelton grew up in Manahawkin and experienced the transition of the area from isolated rural communities served by rail to vacation and retirement had been served by automobile. For one who's grown up at the Garden State Parkways, that earlier era is becoming harder and harder to imagine, much less see as a place in a landscape.

As a novelist, I want to look at that place the way someone does who has lived and experienced it, and for that we need a map. But what use is a map for a novelist who could make things up and create wholly imaginary landscapes and doesn't need any anchor other than his own imagination?

Well, a character has to come from someplace. And since a character and a novelist is both an imaginative creation and projection of a cultural landscape, I need an 'X' through whose senses, thoughts and actions I could help a reader to experience and feel that landscape.

24:16

Ed Hazelton was a duck hunter and a decoy carver who grew up in an old Victorian with a sun porch and a steeple. During World War II, he joined the Navy and went to Guam as a combat air patrol mechanic on Admiral Miniss' plane, and would have stayed in the Navy if his old grandmother hadn't wanted him home.

He came from a close-knit family dominated by that grandmother who lived until the age of 97, and it never occurred to him to go against her wishes and leave like so many of his contemporaries did. He stayed in Manahawkin, continuing a family presence in that area that went back nearly 200 years.

In 1983, he drew a map of his hometown Manahawkin as he remembered it from his boyhood in the 1920s.

25:02

The world he depicted was already gone. A world before the Garden State Parkway and vacation developments and strip malls. His drawing is an intimate look back. The signs indicated are those of immediate and extended family, a small-town American landscape of family farms, church, and little evidence of outside encroachment except for the railroad and a Sunoco gas station, which he pronounced as "Sunny Co" as a way of marking it as a foreign presence.

It's an idealized landscape, and the picture is imagined easily enough today. We can all conjure up images of small-town American life. The world of the past comes to us ready-made and we could detour here into a consideration of how this visual construction of the past in history, which comes to us through photography, newspapers, magazines, old movies, is itself a mapping of modernity. But this would only be superficial. Cliché piled on cliché.

26:05

We're looking for a deeper geography, or more precisely, we're looking for different ways of looking at what is no longer there that we've seen, and then constructing a view based less on the church steeples, gas stations, rail crossings, front porches and dirt roads of what we already know, or the L.L.Bean version of Ed with a shotgun in his plaid shirt, and more on what we must imagine of the thinking and feeling Ed, who is old now and confused and a little angry because he no longer feels comfortable in a world changing all around him, whose map today has 'X's on it he doesn't recognize and who we must assume was aware of the loss he was putting on his own town map by leaving this out and not including that.

We can't see any of it anymore. But we can get an impression of those meadows and marshes from the old topo maps, which have the feel of earlier scales of time and distance and also give an impression of the broader landscape of Ed Hazelton's New Jersey, its ponds, its fogs and marshes, its rivers, roads and rail lines.

27:12

Ed would have known the Philadelphia and Beach Haven railroad shown in the 1907 map here as a hatch line crossing Manahawkin Bay to a virtually uninhabited Long Beach Island on which sand dunes are still shown in the irregular red outline and the blue surf radiates the ocean word in long blue pinstripes.

The 1952 Ship Bottom quadrangle is named for the town that sprang up after the old railroad bridge was replaced by the Route 72 causeway and led in the 1930s a development of the island as a summer vacation place. The older topographic details have been replaced using data compiled from subsequent surveys and aerial photographs.

The creeks and ponds shown as empty marshland in the 1907 map have been resurveyed and their boundaries redrawn, which by the 1972 photo revision have been developed into a sprawling subdivision called Beach Haven West, stamped on the landscape in bright purple.

28:17

Adjacent the 1952 West Creek quadrangle, we see the Garden State Parkway, first in red as a sketch in plan then 20 years later in dark purple as a heavy-duty six-lane roadway with arterial cloverleaf exits flowing past the drive-in theater, a landing field, a lakeside speedway, a golf course, and two trailer parks.

We can get a sense of what's been lost in Ed's world in looking at the succession of maps. And we empathize with his sense of loss because we've all experienced similar transformations and live a little unsettled with our own topographical overlays of present and past.

Back in the 1930s, a journalist, Episcopal priest and honorary Piney named Henry Charlton Beck noted that in southern New Jersey, maps, like many other things, work in reverse.

29:14

They continue to today. To live in Ed's world through a series of maps is not only to see the transformation of the region through time but also to see the traces of its decline and abandonment and with it the transformation of a relationship to nature and the environment on a historical and geographic scale.

We have a glimpse of what is no longer there and place names that survived on topographical maps. In the 1920s, Ed would still have been able to see many of them as ruins. The thriving industries and towns of the 19th century had all but disappeared by then. Today, even the ruins are gone, returned to nature. Places like Martha and Harrisville, where the sluices that once channeled water to the mills still show up on the map, although today they're just empty ditches running through the forest.

30:07

In a sense, he felt caught between two kinds of oblivion: the oblivion of the vanished iron and paper and glass towns that survived only as place names on the old topo maps and the oblivion of development and so-called progress, which he believes in, distrusts and resents all at the same time.

He lives in both places at once: the Manahawkin of his memory where he can still smell the horses' hooves burning in Seymour Schuth's blacksmith's shop on Mill Creek, where there was a tin cup on a string he could throw into the water to get a drink, and the Manahawkin today where a ShopRite stands in the field where he used to hunt rabbit and shoot quail and run with his dogs, where he knew everybody, and Uncle Henry would come up the road with a couple of fox dogs and Mr. Johnson would come up the road with his dogs and they'd all go down to the end of Stafford Avenue together where it crossed Parker, which back then was a wagon road through the woods that took them down onto the meadows, and is now nothing but strangers. In Ed's words, "altogether different. Altogether different."

31:12

Mapping is altogether different, too. Today, we don't need paper. We can zoom. Zooming breaks the frame, and with it a part of the framework of cartographic representation.

But if zooming is new, looking and seeing are not. They've always been part of the human makeup. Remote imaging, the digitization and computer manipulation of spatially referenced data have not made looking, or the imaginative artistic character of map-making or map-reading, obsolete.

If anything, the new technologies have brought different creative elements to the fore, and it would be a big mistake to say that because we break out of a particular framework we're seeing that frames no longer exist. They have simply become more variable.

32:02

The new technology has trained our attention in a different direction, and rather than seeking the scale of the universal world of the 16th century map maker like Abraham Ortelius, our scale is a world of many universes. And mapping is, to quote Denis Crossgrove, "a creative process of inserting our humanity into the world and seizing the world for ourselves."

So, let's zoom back in. Back, back, back to that L-shaped room and the 'X' that I can see from my window. It's on Pierre L'Enfant's original plan for Washington, a city built to symbolize the new political order that was itself an expression of a new, more natural society and the landscape.

L'Enfant's plan was a projection of Renaissance rationalism, and like Thomas Jefferson, he shared an interest in Palladian geometry and classical architectural form and he built on a simple grid of William Penn's design for Philadelphia, combining it with elements of European garden and landscape design.

33:07

A little more cultural and historical context helps us understand how this very practical and rational scheme for the city evolved out of ideas about nature and our relationship to it, particularly the settlement of the land and the transformation of the wilderness, which the great survey expeditions were charged with mapping.

These were not just economic and scientific but moral and spiritual imperatives that invested the land, and particularly the wilderness, with transcendent meaning. It's interesting to see how the American landscape tradition, which grew out of the European tradition of landscape-painting, was also the product of a geographical imagination linked to cartography.

Zoom back to see the capital, shown here in an 1872 bird's eye panoramic, a painterly perspective of a foreground, middle ground and horizon that very closely mirrors the landscapes that would be painted out West.

34:06

That year, FV Hayden had just finished his survey of Yellowstone and submitted his report to Congress, which along the topographical maps included spectacular landscape paintings like this one by Thomas Moran and large-format photographs by William Henry Jackson.

In New Jersey, the iron and paper and glass towns of the Pine Barrens were in deep production, and Joseph Wharton was about to start buying up all the land around them. In Washington, the capital was now complete, the hub of the new democracy fully inscribed onto the landscape, a new nature and a new order whose power symbolized in broad lines radiated into the horizon.

Beyond a newly-finished Washington monument, we see the Potomac River and Arlington National Cemetery, which L'Enfant, who died in poverty in 1925 was buried in Maryland, would not have foreseen. His remains were removed and interred there in 1909 when his original plan for the Grand Avenue that is now the National Mall was finally realized.

35:14

Today, the spot where he's buried offers one of the best views of the city. And engraved on his tomb is the map for that city, part of which I can see from my window as an 'X' marking the plot of ground he labeled with the number 843.

Thank you very much.

[Applause]

Keven Gallagher: Wow!

[Laughter]

36:03

Keven Gallagher: While Frederick was talking, I was writing down sort of some words to describe how I was feeling and what I was thinking, and here's some of the words: eloquent, entertaining, thought-provoking, creative, inspiring, surprising, and a beautiful alternative illustration of mapping. Just some thoughts that came out.

Thank you, that was awesome.

[Applause]

[Music]