For this week, beyond bumping through four more chapters of the Making Maps book on Monday, lettuce take a look at a paper called Desert Wonderings.
Here is a copy of the article with some of my highlighting, if you care
Put some notes and comments and questions in your weekly blog posting.
Be ready to say something about these ideas in terms of the paper – and the idea of food deserts and food desert maps – and your class project (which might be more of an effort!)
In this reading, and discussion, we are putting a real-world case together with the mapping: which is the way it should be.
- Maps show us “reality” but filtered through our ideas & concepts about the world.
- Ideas/concepts shape how we collect data (primary, secondary) for mapping
- What if the ideas/concepts have problems?
- Does that mean the data has problems?
- Does that mean the map has problems?
- Are the ideas/concepts, or data, or maps wrong?
- How can you make sure your concepts/ideas are more appropriate?
- How might that shape data collection, and the final map?
Some sources
- Maps: USDA Food Access Research Atlas
- Food Swamp Maps
- Asset Mapping
- Ponder George Lakoff’s conceptualization of Framing: The power of framing: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it
- “problem closure,” which occurs “…when a specific definition of a problem is used to frame subsequent study of the problem’s causes and consequences in ways that preclude alternative conceptualizations of the problem.” From Maarten A. Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse – Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process – Oxford Scholarship Online