Science and Technology Studies (STS) is an inter-disciplinary field emerging over the past forty years. It is based within the critical social sciences and addresses the mutual construction of science and technology with society. A common understanding is that science and technology help shape society while society in turn shapes the nature of science and technology. This idea challenges a determinist account of science and technology as inherently rational, developmental, and progressive. It also moves past foundational epistemologies that reply on fact-value distinctions and similar binary divisions that pit subjectivity against objectivity.
It is not a difficult conceptual leap to consider the relevance of STS for thinking about maps. In one sense the history of mapping has been a history of the technologies used to make and distribute maps. Historical changes in mapping practice occurred with changes in technical means. STS can help clarify how this is not a determinist progression, however, as so-called “advancements” in technology are fully dependent upon their historical context for meaning and import.
Nor is it a challenge to consider the STS critique of Science in terms of maps. The rise of modern mapmaking in the 15th and 16th centuries occured alongside the broader rise of modern science. Moreover, the mapping metaphor is replete within scientific discourse and is regularly invoked as scientific thinking itself. As David Turnbull says, “Maps are often taken as emblematic of scientific knowledge; just as, scientific theories are often taken as inherently maplike.”
STS offers suggestive ways to further consider mapping as a practice. This understanding questions the value of seeking the meaning of mapping solely within the map’s design and making, or in the map as an artifact itself, or it’s interpretation and use by an audience. These need not be considered as discrete events. Rather the practice of mapping is a continuous process throughout. Finally, mapping is far from the neutral mirroring of an external world. Rather, maps are propositions about the way we want the world to be.
