“Now we need to make Italians”. Semiotics and Semantics in Teaching Cartography
Abstract
Cartography remains a cornerstone of contemporary pedagogy and everyday life, with a profusion of digital maps, mApps, and navigational tools intersecting in daily life. Included in this are uncounted maps circulating on coins and banknotes within the Eurozone. Yet despite this proliferation of cartography, geography teaching remains excessively focused on a mechanistic method of teaching mapmaking according to mathematics, composition, and components; while geographers who use maps often do so in isolation from maps’ provenance. This article uses the example of maps on euro banknotes to make two arguments. First, that maps do not reflect reality – they create it. Through their banal omnipresence, these maps help construct an identity of “European” which does not reflect the reality of the EU. Second, this paper demonstrates the necessity of a semiotic and semantic approach to teaching maps, map language, and the power of maps to construct identity. This calls for a Lexical Approach in which maps are critically examined as the end process of complex performances which call the map into being, rather than a purely Functional Approach in which maps are treated and taught as neutral, value-free reflections of the world.References
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