NORTHFIELD — Cartographer Andrew Middleton traveled about 100 miles from his store, The Map Center, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Dickinson Memorial Library last week to share the truths behind maps’ lies.
Visitors gathered at the library on Friday to hear “How Maps Lie,” Middleton’s presentation on the different shapes maps can take and their intents beyond telling people where to go.
Middleton has worked in geographic information systems for about 13 years, with gigs at an environmental consulting firm, an information technology company and Google Maps. With a degree in environmental science, not cartography (the science or art of making maps), Middleton said 90% of his cartography knowledge is self-taught.
“I had strong opinions about dolphins when I graduated,” Middleton said in an interview after the program. “I didn’t have technical skills.”
While wrestling through the gig economy of the Silicon Valley, Middleton read an article about the previous owner of The Map Center looking for someone to take over. To help him decide whether to move across the country, Middleton took to Twitter.
In an unconventional introduction on Friday, he projected the poll he posted, asking Twitter, “Should I move to Rhode Island to take ownership of a 70-year-old map store in a converted mill building?”
According to Middleton, 89.8% of the respondents chose, “It is your destiny.” So, he moved in with the maps “in very ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ fashion.”
Before taking the audience on a tour of a few of his favorite maps, Middleton projected René Magritte’s painting of a pipe above the French translation of, “This is not a pipe.”
“The whole point of a map is that it’s different from reality,” Middleton told the audience. “If you want reality, go outside. If you want something that condenses reality and tells you something new about reality, that’s what we use a map for. So when I say that all maps are wrong, what I mean is that’s the thing that makes a map worth having.”
Instead of absolute truths, Middleton said maps distill perspectives. With humans behind every map or map machine, he said each one is messy.
“You can either run away from the mess or you can find joy in the mess, and I feel like cartographers find joy in the mess,” Middleton said after the presentation.
Starting with the Mercator projection, he talked visitors through about 15 maps. A map the CIA designed in 1954 of the world from Washington D.C.’s window resembled flipping the globe on its tip. A geological map of the Mississippi River stretched into swirling branches like neurons. Middleton even shared linear maps of transit lines, tactile maps for the visually impaired and a friend’s map of nearby ramen spots plotted by time.
“Anything can be a map,” Middleton said. He pointed to the islands and ocean swells in a Micronesian stick chart, a map made of sticks and shells Micronesians learn from their elders and memorize before setting off to sea.
“Have you ever been to Turtle Island?” Middleton asked the audience with deadpan sarcasm before guiding them through a map of North and Central America created by Indigenous people. (Turtle Island is used by some Indigenous tribes to refer to the continent.)
For his last map, he displayed a collage called, “Places to Kiss Girls and Hear Night Herons” from the Oakland Museum of California. Middleton said the Oakland teenagers’ map marked the perfect close to his presentation.
“I will never be a teenager in Oakland. One thing I love about maps is they give you the opportunity to experience the place you already know and love through somebody else’s eyes,” Middleton said. He encouraged the audience to go home and make “an imperfect, ugly, impractical map.”
For his two-hour drive back to Rhode Island, he planned on opening Google Maps.