Field Notes - ENGL 817AJ - The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

Why, oh why, did we not read this book first?! The Cartographers was a great book!

I mean I know why - we needed to establish the field to begin with - but this book ties in so many of the concepts we have been discussing all semester: mapping non-existent places, textual image maps, genre (mystery) as textual map, cognitive mapping, map and author authenticity. So much of what we have been studying this semester is present in this book. What a great wrap-up!

Map of the NYPL as approximated in the novel.

There is one specific aspect I want to note that fortuitously relates to the research I was doing for my final paper on Muppet Treasure Island. Sébastien Caquard wrote a collection of articles on how geography and cartography relate and compliment cinema and film-making. He references about a lot of digital mapping, like Google Earth, and how it plays in to modern cartography, but that cartography isn't really influenced in the other direction from digital mapping. However, he specifies that cinema has actually influenced the invention of digital mapping - such as the smooth zoom out/in from a minute location to a wide arcing view of a city, to a country, to the world.

What does this have to do with The Cartographers? Well, one of the characters, Felix, works for Haberson Global, a giant tech company that has developed a digital map, bigger and more intense than Google Earth. The company feeds this digital map-thing massive amounts of data to not only map things, but to map predictions and locate answers or people on a map from all of the data it consumes. The whole premise of the novel is about mapping a place that does and doesn't exist all at the same time. And the digital map-maker wants to possess the non-existent creative abilities of this 'place' in order to create places in reality from just a map. The map creates the place, not the place creating the map like traditional cartography.

This concept is part cartography, part geography and part science fiction. To create reality from a map would require a 'perfect' map, and those do not exist. There is always bias, stuff added in, and omitted. But the fantasy of it is just what cinema does - just not in reality, but on screen.

I can only imagine what could be done with this novel's story if it was ever optioned for film or television. The possibilities intrigue me!

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This is my last field notes post for the semester. I hope it was worth the read to see how my brain connected with the concepts and ideas of this class. This field of study and research was new for me, and I enjoyed the challenge it gave me to step out of my comfort zone in some ways, but also still allowed me to focus on my research area of adaptation studies.