Cultures of map use

Research into map use has so far largely focused on cognitive approaches and under-played the significance of wider contextual concerns associated with the cultures in which mapping operates. Meanwhile, cartography is being popularised and people are creating and employing their own maps instead of relying upon cartographers. Critical cartography has begun to offer new ways of understanding this cultural and social change, but research into map use has so far not engaged with this critical turn. It is argued that an approach informed by critical cartography is becoming more and more appropriate, stressing the need to rethink map use as a set of everyday activities practiced in real-world contexts and arguing map use is best interpreted using methodologies from the social sciences, employing a mixture of ethnographic and textual methods. Using case studies of community mapping, the mapping of golf courses, map collecting and mapping art, this paper shows how different insights into the nature of map use can flow from rethinking mapping. It is concluded that networks of practice of map use depend upon relations between many different artefacts, technologies, institutions, environments, abilities, affects, and individuals. © The British Cartographic Society 2008.