User:Tomkoch/Denis Wood

NOte: This is an alternate biography proposed as a substitution for one now in Wikipidia for the cartographer Denis Wood. I have begun to add references that are needed. I know and have worked with Wood for some years. As a journalist and an ethicist (medical) I realize that raises the bar for my critique of the work by the unnamed author who, I assume, also has personal knowledge of Wood. I've been careful in my comments and rewrite to meet the standard of good and ethical public writing.

=Denis Wood= Denis Wood is an artist, author, and cartographer best known for his book The Power of Maps (1992). Considered radical when published, The Power of Maps has been a lynchpin of the "new cartographies" in which maps are redefined as socially constructed arguments based upon consistent semiotic codes.

The book was first issued in 1992 as a catalogue accompanying a major exhibition called The Power of Maps at the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design in New York. That show was later remounted at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in 1994. These exhibitions that were the graphic genesis of the 1992 book which has been the subject of both scholarly commentary and popular interest.

Wood’s consistent critique "of the ideals of modern academic cartographers and of modern cartographic ideology" has been wide ranging, informed, and decisive. In 2004, John Pickles, Early N. Phillips Distinguished professor at the University of North Carolina summed up Wood’s contributions this way: "For over twenty-five years, Denis Wood has been provoking us to think differently and critically about maps and map use."

As opposed to those who insist maps "represent" reality the critical cartographers, led by Wood, have insisted maps represent nothing. Instead, they present an argument about the world through the careful choice of content arranged graphically at a specific scale. This thesis, and the mechanisms of its activation, is at the heart of Wood and John Fel’s 2008 University of Chicago press publication, The Natures of Maps. As one reviewer put it: "In 1986 Wood and Fels took apart the map; describing ten codes through which its signs create meaning. Their argument was subsequently enfolded into Wood’s The Power of Maps …Twenty-one years later, Wood and Fels have put the map back together again ‘by replacing the whole idea of the map as a representation with that of the map as a system of propositions.’" "The map is not a picture," Wood and Fels insist in this new book, "It is an argument … everything about a map, from top to bottom, is an argument."

This idea of the map as an argument presented rather than a reality represented extends a more general thesis on the manner in which we "construct" the world through a range of socially-conditioned perspectives, and do so at various scales. A relevant but quite distinct title in this area of work is Wood’s 2004 volume, Five Billion Years of Global Change: A History of the Land. More recently, Wood has joined his expertise in cartography with his interest in art and art history. A collage artist and painter, He has created in recent years a bibliography and history of cartographic art, work that from the Dadaist to the present have used maps as a medium for the exposition of cultural and political ideas and ideals. Again, the general thesis is the same as in Wood’s other work: images—whether map, art, or artful maps—present a thesis through selection of subject matter self-consciously arranged through a medium’s tools of exposition.

Wood's personal history is detailed in his books, including The Power of Maps and Home Rules, as well as having been retold in interviews like his with Chicago Public Radio's Ira Glass.

A former professor of Design at North Carolina State University, Wood was born in 1945 and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1968 he received a BA in English then Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University). In 1971 he received an MA in geography from Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. There he received his PhD in 1973 for a dissertation on the manner in which individuals learn to navigate in new urban environements.

Following two years as a high school teacher in Worcester, where he developed a teaching program for non-traditional students, in 1974 Wood joined the faculty at North Carolina State University where through 1995 he taught environmental psychology, landscape history, and design in the School of Design (now the College of Design).

Wood’s work has been contentious. For more than a decade, the argument of Wood’s 1992 book was debated in cartographic circles. The Power of Maps exhibition at the Smithsonian was criticized in letters to the editor by fellow North Carolinians who objected to his "deconstruction" of state road maps as value-laden advertisments for the automobile society rather than as neutral representations of simple realities. Similarly, his gleeful insistence in 2003 that "Cartography is dead (Thank God!), published in a journal of cartography, continues to spark widespread debate and comment.

Wood’s personal life has has not been without controversy. In April 1996, Wood pleaded guilty to "crimes against nature" (fellatio), and taking indecent liberties with a minor. Some have used this as a means of attacking Wood rather than addressing the content of his writing and work. The geographer Jane Jacobs, for example, has wondered in press whether Wood’s arrest and incarceration may be one reason why some of his work receives less attention than it deserves. It is important to put Wood’s incarceration in the greater context of his life and work. This is what Wood has done in writing and speaking about his prison experience. The father of two boys with whom he retains a close association, his writing and work continued and since his release he has continued to live in Raleigh, NC, while lecturing and working internationally in his field. For example, in 2008 he presented a plenary at the Royal Geographical Society in London on the future of the map.

Indeed, both his recent writings (much of it detailed in the footnotes of this biography) and his prominance as a lecturer, nationally and internationally, attest to the importance of his more recent work and his place within the international community of scholars.

Books written

 * The Power of Maps - 1992
 * Home Rules with Robert Beck - 1994
 * Seeing through Maps with Ward Kaiser - 2001, and a second edition in 2006
 * Five Billion Years of Change: A History of the Land - 2004
 * Making Maps with John Krygier - 2005
 * The Natures of Maps with John Fels - 2008
 * The Power of Maps2, forthcoming - 2009