Our discussion last week about maps and their importance in setting and shifting paradigms had me thinking about where and how these might be used as communication and storytelling tools. The radical mapping people were focused on college campuses, and other presenters talked about community activism and websites, but as a child with four teachers as grandparents, my mind went immediately to museums.
The presenters noted that people trust maps: if it’s on a map, it’s probably true. The same is true with museums: if it’s in a display, of course it’s trustworthy. And museums, more than most other places, can use maps in enormously powerful ways to depict justice, history, inequality, and the thousands of ways that our world has changed over time, from demographics to geography to climate to our borders themselves. Mapmakers have the power to choose who is represented, where the lines go, which parts to emphasize and how to group areas together. And as museums increasingly become places to delve into the gray areas of history and explore the subjective ways that different people tell the same story, maps become important tools in developing and changing those narratives.
This isn’t just the case for history museums, although they may have more ground to cover than most in order to correct the whitewashing and sanitization of our past. I’ve seen plenty of maps in natural history museums and science centers, depicting biomes, habitats, weather patterns, shifting climate conditions, and even the stories of people and animals affected by climate change. Art museums, too, can use maps to provide context for different works, show how different regions influenced each other, and trace the intersections of art, culture, and history at scales as large as continents or as small as cities.
But as an environmental policymaker and activist, I was most interested in our discussion of how maps can be overlayed to provide a richer perspective on different data measures. Statistical analysis, p values, and even perfectly valid numerical data is easy to manipulate and difficult to communicate, especially in a way that connects with people’s hearts, minds, and consciences. But maps let audiences not only draw those same conclusions on their own in a more engaging way than just numbers on a page, but also connect on a more personal level to the information and the story it tells. If I see a map of data for the United States, the first thing I do is look to see what it says about Tennessee and North Carolina — immediately, I’m able to directly relate myself and my experiences to the information in the map, and this lends itself to a much more convincing and striking conclusion because it impacts me personally rather than being another statistic that I can turn around and immediately forget. So as museums seek to create compelling narratives that educate, challenge, and engage children and adults alike, maps can provide a powerful tool for making and breaking worldviews to fit our ever-evolving understanding of ourselves.
