Mappings

These two readings really got me thinking about the process of selecting and editing information in an effort to creating a mapping. I spent a good deal of my childhood tromping through the woods with my surveyor dad, holding a prism in "key" points in order to create a mapping of a particular area of land. To think now of the responsibility that was put in my hands; finding the toe and break of a hill, balancing the prism precisely on a point at the boundry corner and estimating the height to a tenth of an inch of a stonewall. The selection of those points becomes the starting point of a mapping process. The process of then translating the three dimensions of the land into a two dimensional drawing then has another version of selection and editing. This mapping then goes on to be used to fight property ownership battles, create a deed, or to aid in a design process.

This made me think of my experience in architecture firms where we use civil engineers drawings, usually without question, to create a three dimensional intervention in a three dimensional world, but represented in two dimensions. It seems that the process of mapping once it is put in the hands of the designer is totally dependent on the decisions already made by someone else, thereby making the selecting and editing process completely dependent on the measurements and decisions made by someone you may never have met, or in my case by some kid who was more worried about keeping the mosquitos off than putting a prism in the proper place.