Here is an evocative piece from the Chronicle Review on the imaginative potency of maps.
My Life in Maps – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
I particularly liked the paragraph on the edges of maps–the places where it used to be written “Here be dragons” to denote spaces of fear and reticence. As the author notes, today the standard map sheet directs us to a cascading series of other sheets and files. But edges can still be found in the world. In a series of aerial photos that we work with in Armenia, the edge is a hard one roughly 10km from the border with Turkey. This edge is stamped “classified” today, or in Medieval cartographic parlance: “here be dragons”.
