Adopting critical cartography approaches, our team assembled a variety of living maps.
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Combining not only visualization and storytelling but also social science and human geography methods, these maps incorporate narratives and stories about encounter, dispersal and experience. The maps are created with and hosted by ArcGIS StoryMaps.
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Slide through a selection of our latest maps and visit the websites here:
Here you can also scroll through some of our initial Living Maps, that were created in Heidelberg/Germany:
The term Living Maps has been popularized by the „Living Maps Network“ (https://www.livingmaps.org). We were inspired by their work and the term as we not only aim to bring our cartographies of social and ecological factors of disease control together, but also incorporate more fluidity and agency of mosquitoes as living organisms. Living organisms that are active at space-making themselves. Generally, living maps are part of an intervention in counter-cartography that tries to play with genres of traditional cartographic depiction as a seemingly neutral observer, with a „god’s eye view“ (Haraway). Counter-cartographies are sensitive to the power imbued in maps and map-making. They aim to queer the representations by including unconventional cartographic methods, such as participatory, artistic and bottom-up approaches, see for instance the project This Is Not An Atlas (https://notanatlas.org/about/) by kollektiv orangotango for a wonderful collection of counter-maps. In multispecies studies we are inspired by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou’sproject Feral Atlas (https://feralatlas.supdigital.org) that -just like us- aims to think infrastructures differently: „Instead of thinking with trains, planes, and ships separately, Feral Atlas groups together the set of infrastructures designed to move things around over long distances and at great speed“ (Introduction, Feral Atlas). To us Aedes mosquitoes are the living things that draw together the infrastructures of mobility, disease risk and coexistence this project aims to document.