Mapping and Meaning
26 March 2008
Led by Dr Piers Dixon, RCAHMS, in collaboration with Professor Charles Withers, University of Edinburgh.
Workshop Summary
Maps are commonplace yet complex documents. Used to locate geographical features and to illustrate spatial distributions, maps also reflect a variety of social and political meanings and relationships and incorporate difficult technical decisions over how best to symbolise and simplify the world to different audiences and users. Maps are a common cultural resource, yet they are also a complex repository of information and a responsibility - to keep up-to-date, to produce and to disseminate.
This seminar will bring together researchers and institutions working with maps and with the meanings in maps. Attention will be paid to the utility of maps in the evaluation, interpretation and recording of landscape features (including place names and other features of habitation and use) and to the institutional imperatives to be recognised in managing maps as meaningful documents. Themed sets of papers will address the mutually supporting ideas of 'Mapping and Ideology' and 'Mapping and Technology' in order both to illustrate recent work in these fields and as the basis to discussion which will address the nature of new research findings, the technical bases by which maps are commonly being produced and disseminated, and, importantly, the shared opportunities and problems faced by those institutions in Scotland for whom the map is regularly used in recording and research.
Organiser Biographies
Charles Withers is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Edinburgh. He has research interests in the history of geographical knowledge, including mapping, and in the geographies of science. Recent publications include Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and he has recently completed a set of essays on mapping, science and the Enlightenment for volume 4 (forthcoming) of the University of Chicago's History of Cartography series. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Piers Dixon is an Operations Manager in Survey and Recording for RCAHMS. He has worked on landscape surveys in many parts of Scotland and has been closely involved with the Historic Land-use Assessment project, using GIS to map the human impacts on the Scottish landscape. His research interests lie primarily in rural settlement. Recent publications include Puir Labourers and Busy Husbandmen (Birlinn, 2002) and the rural settlement chapters of In the Shadow of Bennachie (RCAHMS, 2007). He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and a member of the Institute of Field Archaeologists.
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