Cartography as Linguistic-Visual Vocabulary: a Neopragmatist Approach to Geographical World Creation

Abstract This article develops a neopragmatist approach to cartography that understands maps as linguistic-visual vocabularies for geographical world creation. The starting point is the diagnosis of a mediatized present in which spatial meanings increasingly arise in hybrid arrangements of language, images, and technical infrastructures. Against this background, it is argued that the analytical separation between linguistically oriented and visual approaches in geography is losing its explanatory power. Cartography is a paradigmatic case in which visibility and sayability are inextricably intertwined. Theoretically, the article develops Rorty’s neopragmatism as a metatheoretical framework for cartographic research that considers the entanglement of language and visuality. Maps are not understood as representations of an objective world but as contingent, historically grown, and normatively framed tools. Their epistemic value is measured by their problem-solving potential. The concept of vocabulary makes it possible to analyze cartographic images as changeable and criticizable practices of redescription that make certain versions of the world plausible and hide others. Selected examples from digital cartography, maps in computer games, and artificial intelligence (AI)-supported visualizations are used to show how cartographic vocabularies are currently expanding and transforming. Interactive maps and story maps function as narrative interfaces, maps in computer games make the contingency of spatial order experimentally tangible, and algorithmically generated maps point to new forms of power. The current article is intended as an integrative draft that combines critical cartography, visual geographies, and discourse-analytical approaches in a pragmatist sense and profiles cartography as an open, reflexive, and socially relevant practice of world creation.