It’s hard for me to believe that before I read Corner’s essay for the first time I had never consciously questioned the indisputable absoluteness and neutrality of maps (tracings) as tools for navigating city streets, foreign cities, and backwoods hikes. I had never intellectually engaged with the obvious, that maps are made from a series of conscious choices and omissions by the map maker, and that the same piece of land can be mapped in almost inexhaustible ways and reveal something different every time. For me, then, it has been incredibly interesting and useful to begin to engage with mapping as a subjective and creative process.

With this in mind, the exploration of Venice that we are now undertaking as a class, with the aid of a thorough GIS dataset of the region, seems overwhelmed with possibilities. I very much look forward to engaging with the issues presented by Cosgrove and Corner as well as the opportunities presented by this data while exploring Venice in more depth. I’m hard pressed to imagine a region of the world more widely known and studied than Venice yet, as Corner says of mapping: “its agency lies in neither reproduction nor imposition but rather in uncovering realities previously unseen or unimagined, even across seemingly exhausted grounds. Thus, mapping unfolds potential; it remakes territory over and over again…”