Cartography: The Translational Science of Maps and Mapping

Cartography plays a central role in how society represents, comes to know, and moves through the world. Wars have been fought over lines on the maps cartographers draw, but so, too, have community organizers as cartographers used maps to reclaim land. As such, cartography and the maps cartographers create, critique, and research can be understood as claims on the world—what it is and what it might be; cartography is the means of telling stories and making arguments constitutively rendered by map creators and readers. Cartography is both one of the primary modes of public engagement for geographers and one of the primary ways in which the public engages with geography. In this article we consider the role of cartography as a discipline in bridging this multidirectional relationship between geographers and the public, demonstrating the foundational importance of cartography as a means of both communicating research to the public and engaging in active, participatory research therewith. Through examples drawn from academic research, media, and community organizing uses of maps, we demonstrate how cartography functions as paradigmatic translational discipline—intended to translate sets of knowledge claims from one group to another. We begin by defining translational science and its importance to modern society, before turning to critical examinations of how maps have been deployed as translational objects. We conclude by arguing for the centrality of cartography as the translational subdiscipline of geography.