In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Reflections on J.B. Harley’s“Deconstructing the Map”
  • John Krygier (bio)

When asked to reflect on Brian Harley’s “Deconstructing the Map” (Harley 1989) for this special issue of Cartographica, I sat down on the sofa in my office and tried to recall my initial reading of and reaction to the article. What came to mind was less about articles, critiques, theories, or intellectual arguments and more about Harley the person, David Woodward and assorted graduate students, and the Cartographic Lab and History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. But there was also an intellectual impact on work I have done since those long-ago days. Not one I really want to write a typical academic article about, but more on that in a moment.

In 1988–1989 I was finishing my MS at the University of Wisconsin (UW)–Madison with David Woodward (on the maps and illustrations of F.W. von Egloffstein; Krygier 1990) while working as a cartographer in the Cartographic Lab. I was at UW–Madison more or less by accident, having stayed on after my undergraduate degree because of an assistantship offer working in the UW Cartographic Lab. Woodward was, basically, the guy who taught me map design, how to scribe and hand-shade terrain, and Harley was his boisterous pal from Milwaukee. It was an exciting time with a cast of curious characters. Those exotic accents! Harley was larger than life, effusive, affable – always with a bit of a devilish twinkle in his eye. Woodward was reserved, thoughtful, refined, and deliberate, with deep personal warmth that grew as one came to know him. I was a graduate student, learning to become a scholar. I was reading and thinking and discussing with, among others, Harley, Woodward, and graduate students such as Matthew Edney. This process of becoming was not merely an intellectual exercise (reading that article) but a social process whereby deconstructing the map and unshackling the history of cartography from its map-collector confines, mixed with the aforementioned characters, came to shape much of how I was to think and what I was to do later in my career in academia.

After a bit of digging in an old file cabinet, I found my notes from several of Harley’s articles and with these notes (the content sometimes a bit embarrassing) continued the process of reflecting based on those notes. I chose to annotate a few pages of my notes in this article in an attempt to reproduce the scattered bricolage that is the impact, on myself, of “Deconstructing,” Harley, and everything else going on at that time. It is a map, not an image, and thus is selective and generalized, emphasizing what is important and leaving other details out. My reflection could be shaped into a seamless, linear verbal essay, but that would not reflect the reality, as it is, of the impact of the article, the ideas, and the people on the way I think and work.

The biggest impact of “Deconstructing the Map” was that it deconstructed me, the way I thought about my field, what I do and produce. But it was not only “Deconstructing” – it was also the efforts to deconstruct and broaden the idea of the map for the History of Cartography Project and, interestingly, Denis Wood’s review of the first volume of the History of Cartography Project (Wood 1987), which deconstructed the constructions reconstructed after the deconstruction of the idea of the map in a frightening manner. My intellect was forever shattered, the norms always open to questioning, not only the norms of “maps” but also what academics said maps were and how they expressed their work. Thus, the work I am most proud of – the un-textbook textbook Making Maps (Krygier and Wood 2011); its quirky companion blog Makingmaps.net (Krygier 2005–2014); “Ce n’est pas le monde” (Krygier and Wood 2009), a peer-reviewed comic book chapter in Dodge et al.’s Rethinking Maps (Dodge, Kitchin, and Perkins 2009); and my ongoing psychogeographic Unmaking Maps project. Harley’s “Deconstructing” had a similar impact on the field of cartography and beyond. But it wasn’t only that article and Harley. It...

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