Survey from the Sky: Maps and Methods in Conflict

• In Event: Environmentalists, Spies, and Scientists: Remote Sensing in and of Eurasia II

Abstract

In 1988, in the days after the Spitak earthquake in Soviet Armenia, a team from Tbilisi took a helicopter out to survey the damage. Afterward they produced an early computer map of their results. To the contemporary eye, the isoline map of damage zones is familiar, albeit rendered in ASCII. A closer look, however, shows a vastly different picture of damage than one would expect, classifying the most devastated city as moderately damaged. The authors of the map were well aware of this discrepancy and described the reason in accompanying text: visual survey is dependent on weather conditions, and cloud cover prevented them from assessing the full scale of damage in the worst hit zone. Nevertheless, the very presence of isolines as the data visualization method makes it extremely difficult to not to read at face value, even knowing the caveats the cartographers themselves have made.

In this paper I use the Spitak damage assessment map as a prompt to discuss the hazard of assumed authority of the cartographic image as it applies to disaster. Combining insights from recent literature in Geography on both verticality and cartographic imagination, I argue that maps create authority from implied methodology, regardless of the practice through which they were actually created and the transparency with which they are described. The allure of the map transcends even the voice of its own authors. I conclude by extending the conundrum of the helicopter map to the age of drone monitoring, asking what we think we’re seeing.

Author

• Evangeline McGlynn, Harvard U