The blog is live, and I feel I should do an inauguration post.
In the early ’90 I read abook by American author William Least Heat Moon, whose Blue Highways, a Journey into America I had loved as a first-year university student.
The new book was called PrairyErth (A Deep Map) and it was something really different.
If the early book was an exploration of America along secondary roads and off-beat tracks, PrairyErth was an exploration of a very small, limited portion of the territory – but it was an in depth exploration.
Using a set of survey maps, William Least Heath Moon explored every inch of a corner of Kansas called Flint Hills, looking at every detail of the landscape, of the ecology, of the history and society.
That was the idea behind the deep map in the title: that you can take a not-particularly-exciting, everyday place and by looking close enough discover it’s actually interesting, exciting, unique.
The expression deep map I later discovered, caught on, and is currently used to describe an integrated approach to the study of geography and social history – how landscape and inhabitants interact and shape each other. Continue Reading →
