ABSTRACT
I INTRODUCTION-WHY MAPS ARE COOL, AND DANGEROUS
I like maps. When I was a child in elementary school I would write my address on the front of my notebooks as follows-“Brian Langille, 27 Hayward Court, Truro, Colchester County, Nova Scotia, Canada, North America, Western Hemisphere, The World, The Solar System, The Universe”. This idiosyncrasy no doubt explains my current attachment to Google Earth, which, as most of you no doubt know, is a remarkable (and free) computer program. It shows the earth fl oating in space-you see it as if you were on a satellite. You can pick a point on the face of the earth-such as your backyard-and it will zoom in, from outer space, to that point. You end up with a picture of your backyard-which you don’t really need. All the fun is in the zoom. The idea that all the fun is in the zoom is an important grammatical point about maps-you cannot have a map of the world or of Truro Nova Scotia for that matter, on a scale of 1 cm = 1 cm. That would not be a map. To attempt to create such a thing would be instead an exercise in wallpapering. (And imagine trying to fold such a thing.) The point (and magic) of maps, whether the sort that used to hang in the elementary school rooms of Truro Nova Scotia, or Google Earth, is to offer us a chance see things in relationship to one another (how to get from here to there-or, where are we?) All the fun really is in the zoom. This requires scale or abstraction or distance or perspective.
