Thoughts on Map Mapping

I was reading my dear blogmate Catherine’s article on her mind mapping experience, and an interesting term “map mapping” was mentioned a couple of times.

It might be a typo, but on second thought I found the idea so intriguing. And I started thinking about how maps can be mapped, and what a map of maps would look like. I searched online with key words of “map of maps”. The results were only a couple of relevant items. And in one of them, a map of maps was defined as “actually a tree-type structure without single root node (as well as map of maps of maps...)” (Map of Maps, 2010), which I don’t really understand. What’s helpful is that, before searching I was imagining a map of maps as a pictorial result with colors, scales, and irregular shapes. But instead, it has something do to with programming language such as java and c++, and looks like this (Map of Maps, 2013):

I am not an IT professional and I could not decode these secret codes. But somehow it makes sense to me. The pictorial versions of maps are in fact transformed versions of statistics, scripts and stories. And it made me realize, once again, that data could be presented in different forms. As Professor Galey mentioned, dimensions of our lived experience could be revealed in other ways, which may not be available to the observer at the very beginning.

This statement proves it to be so true when later I found that some definitions of a map actually de-categorize it from pictures, “A map is not a photograph of the Earth's surface. It can show many things that a picture cannot show, and as a result, a map looks different in many ways from a photograph of the Earth's surface” (Types of Maps, n.d.).

So, that’s a lovely anecdote in my not so rich research experience. It’s not conclusive, but it’s inspiring.

Reference

Boulianne C. (2016 March 11). My Mind Mapping Experience. Retrieved from http://methodologicalagnostics.blogspot.ca/2016/03/my-map-mapping-experience.html?showComment=1458142020239#c320895898466234880

Galey A. (2016) Week 6 Blogging Question: Stories Told in Numbers. Retrieved from http://galeyinf1240.blogspot.ca/

Nathan Petersen, (2013, July 22). Map of Maps – How to Keep the Inner Maps as Maps. Retrieved from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4120216/map-of-maps-how-to-keep-the-inner-maps-as-maps

Roman. (2010, June 22). Map of Maps Data Structure. Retrieved from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3093718/map-of-maps-data-structure

Types of Maps, (n.d.) Retrieved from https://www.msnucleus.org/membership/html/jh/earth/mapstype/lesson1/mapstypes01a.html