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NEWS

The Fourth Edition of Making Maps, the textbook Denis writes with John Krygier, has just been published by Guildford Press. Resisting the impulse toward bloat, this edition is only three pages longer than the first edition and only thrteen pages longer than the third. Yet there’s so much more here, including geovisual storytelling, gerrymandering, and color,color, color! There’s even a companion website, Making Maps, on Substack. This isn’t just another boring old cartography textbook, it’s a book about … making maps!

Free the Map has just been published by nai010, a Dutch publisher of art, architecture and design books. Written by Henk van Houtum and designed by De Vormforensen, it’s a meticulous dissection of the Frontex map, the EU’s accounting of inmigration. Denis, among others, has contributed a Maplab. His suggests that people are “Born into the world, not here or there” (https://freethemap.org/). But the whole book is essentially a countermap.

First promised as forthcoming back in 1999, Denis’ Soft Time in a Hard Place, his account of the two plus years he spent in the North Carolina prison system, is being readied for the printer. I’d like to imagine it’ll come out this year, but if not, early in the next. In either case, here’s the cover!

Update: See the page from the publisher's website announcing forthcoming publication.
As I prophesied five or six years ago, following my participation in the “roundtable of experts” Trevor Harris pulled together in Morgantown to figure out what “deep mapping” really was, some sort of publication was sure to ensue. Well, it has and it’s a book from Routledge called Making Deep Maps. My chapter is called "The Art of Deep Mapping,” and more or less traces my history of deep mapping, with an emphasis on Home Rules and Everything Sings.
Denis has just had a French translation of his 2012 article, “The Anthropology of Cartography,” which originally appeared in Les Roberts’ Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance, published in La Méditerranée-Planète: Pour un novel atlas d’histoire mondiale (Éditions Mimésis), edited by Anna Maria Medici and Mario Neve, where it occupies pp. 37-64. A PDF of the entire English original edition can be found here.
Denis has just published a review of three books, A People’s Atlas of Detroit, Data Feminism, and When Maps Become the World, on the Making Maps: DIY Cartography blog. The blog is run by John Krygier to support his and Denis’ Making Maps textbook, and Denis has written for it with some frequency. Check out his other contributions by typing his name into the search bar.
In 1930 two boys, Arthur and Joe Lyon, then in their 20s, drove a 1929 Model A Ford from New York to Managua. With only $324 and speaking little Spanish, they made the 4,562-mille trip in 54 ever-exciting days. It may have been North America's first transnational automobile trip, but certainly it was a great adventure. This is Arthur’s account, edited by his nephew, Larry Lyon, for which Denis has provided footnotes on almost every page. Tons of photos. The book’s website is here.
Denis’ article on psychogeography has recently been published by Elsevier in their International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition. He and John Krygier had previously published articles on maps, protest maps, map types, and critical cartography for the volume, all of which have been updated for this second edition, but this is new. Check it out here.
The Kollektiv Orangotango event in Berlin in 2018 has resulted in a This Is Not an Atlas documentary, a 30-some minute video featuring Denis, Philippe Rekacewicz, Bureau d’Études, Erin McElroy (Anti-Eviction Map), and others. It’s worth watching. On the same page you can also access other videos that further document the event. Check it out! The Berlin event, attended by several hundred people, was held at the ZK/U Center of Art and Urbanistics, and included an exhibition, lectures, workshops, and panel discussions.
Denis read “Mapping’s Complicated Media Impulse” back in mid-June, 2016 at a symposium at the Institute of Geography at Johannes Guttenberg-University in Mainz, Germany. Twenty-four scholars participated in this international gathering and still others have contributed to Media’s Mapping Impulse (Franz Steiner Verlag). You can read Denis’ paper here in the Franz Steiner version with illustrations.
Denis in recent news: The president of URISA (Urban and Regional Information Systems Association), Kim McDonough, in a box at the end of his column in Issue 288 of The GIS Professional, promotes The Power of Maps and Rethinking the Power of Maps as “Good Reads”. He says that, “[Wood’s] books also challenge our ideas of what a map is and what stories a map can tell.” Read his interesting column here. Then Kieron Brown, in "Comics, Materiality, and the Limits of Media Combinations” (in ImageTexT, Vol. 9, No. 3), picks up "Ce n'est Pas le Monde (This is Not the World),” the comic Denis made with John Krygier, and engages it extensively, even reproducing one of its pages. Read Brown’s fascinating piece here. Finally, Rashmee Roshan Lall, in writing about our problem with understanding China (The National, May 7, 2019), says: "As the geographer Denis Wood said of all cartography in his 1992 book The Power of Maps, most countries have maps that 'are embedded in a history they help to construct’.” See Lall’s remarks in the Abu Dhabi daily here.
Denis’ “Maps/Language” has just been published online as a Springer "living reference work entry” in its Handbook of the Changing World Language Map (due out in 2020). The Handbook “delivers an interdisciplinary, applied spatial and geographical approach to the study of languages and linguistics.” Denis’ article and the hundred or so other articles that have been already published are available here. Denis’ article alone is here . It argues that while maps do constitute a sign system, they are neither a language nor structured like a language in any way.
Seven years ago Denis read his paper, “Maps and the State,” at the Army financed, and American Geographical Society and University of Kansas sponsored, World Human Geography Conference: Communities and Ethics, which was held at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. This past July the Revista de la Universidad de México ran it, in Spanish, as the lead article in their Mapas issue, where it was beautifully illustrated. The text alone is available as a PDF here.
Denis visited Berlin and Hamburg to help launch the Kollektiv Orangotango’s brilliant This Is Not an Atlas. The Berlin event, attended by several hundred people, was held at the ZK/U Center of Art and Urbanistics, with guests Denis, Philippe Rekacewicz, Bureau d’Études, Erin McElroy (Anti-Eviction Map), Berlin besetzt, Mark Graham, Alarm Phone and others; and included an exhibition, lectures, workshops, and panel discussions. The smaller Hamburg event was held at the W3 in Altona and included a similar range of guests and events. This Is Not an Atlas itself is a large, 350-page hardbound volume, a gathering of more than 40 counter-cartographies from around the world. It also contains a chapter from Krygier and Wood's Making Maps, and a brief essay by Krygier and Wood called “Toward unMaking Maps: A Guide to Experiments in Paracartography.” This is a volume that belongs on everyone’s shelf.
Denis’ jack-o-lanterns map has once again been made the subject of a two-page treatment, this time in Ken Field’s new Cartography, just out from Esri Press. As an “exemplar” it gets a little left-bar essay, here by Wes Jones who writes, “When I see a map such as this, I want to emulate it. To me, this is a sign of a good map.” The book itself is a an alphabetical arrangement of two-page “topics,” including “Critique,” “Functional cartography, “ “Old is new
again,” and “Value-by-alpha maps.” My softbound copy weighs four-and-a-half pounds.

 

The map “Pools of Light" from Denis’ Everything Sings has just been published in the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science’s Body of Knowledge, its online archive of relevant topics. Here the topic is “CV-27-Cartography and Art” which was put together by D. M. Ribeiro and S. Caquard.

The link is here.
The 2018 books are rolling out of warehouses and one of these is The Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography which has Denis’ article,
“Place Mapping” in it. A substantial volume, edited by Alexander Kent and Peter Vujakovic, it’s also available as an ebook. A copy of the article’s proof is here.
Diégo Antolinos-Basso, at SciencesPo in Paris, was in the process of making a flyer to advertise a seminar on spatial analysis he was organizing when a co-organizer shared Everything Sings with him. He immediately wrote to ask if he could use one of its maps. The result is attached.
Denis participated in the 2017 Mappingback: Indigenous Cartographies of Extractive Conflicts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, 14-16 October. The workshop gathered together representatives and members of First Nations (from the Mapuche in Chile to the Bigstone Cree in Alberta); cartographers; and university-based researchers with expertise on extractives. The first half was devoted to brief presentations, the balance to a mapmaking charrette.
Denis donated his significant collection of the clothing worn during the 1960s by the Tzotziles and Tzeltales of the Highlands of Chiapas to the Gregg Museum at North Carolina State University. A huipil from Magdelenas and a pair of high-backed sandals from Zinacantan were included in the Gregg’s inaugural exhibition, Show and Tell. Denis also contributed to the catalogue entries for two maps on scarves.
Studio, an annual publication of the School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech, has just published an interview with Denis about maps and mapping. It was conducted by an eager team of first and second year students. Its six pages can be accessed here.
Denis neighborhood atlas, Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, has just been released in a new digital, streaming edition. Siglio is using a different technology from most e-books in order to preserve the integrity of the design and the book page, so this version is only for use on a single device (probably the computer you use most); and you have to be connected to the internet to read it. This is a streaming version (like something on Vimeo), not a downloadable file, so you won’t be able to print or share it, but you can view it fullscreen and sparkling detail. And the book is out of print. Plus, at $8.99, it’s dirt cheap!
Denis opened a four-session marathon remembering Bill Bunge and celebrating his legacy at the 2017 meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Boston last week. Bunge’s work had an enormous impact on Denis’ life and the direction of his work, and Denis traced this in his paper, “Bunge’s Call.”

Denis and Joe’s Weaponizing Maps was the subject of a panel presentation at La Jícara, a bookstore in Oaxaca, Oaxaca, México, a couple of weeks ago. The book was critiqued by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar, a Mixe with the Colegio Mixe (COLMIX); Kiado Cruz, a Zapotec with Servicos Universitarios y Redes de Conocimientos (SURCO); and Charlie Hale, a gringo with the University of Texas. Joe Bryan responded, and Denis sat in the audience. The event was heavily attended, with active audience participation. Little kids ran around during the presentations and mezcal was enjoyed by all!
See more photographs.
Denis' Boylan Heights atlas was the subject of a short documentary made and broadcast by Korean educational television. Several of the maps were animated and/or accompanied by appropriate sounds (barking dogs, for example). if you click on the link, you’ll have to wait out a commercial, and then once the documentary starts, it’s not until 1:25 that Boylan Heights makes it onto the screen. It’s pretty slick!
See more images.
Denis was recently interviewed for Radio Fabrik in Salzburg, Austria, about maps and mapmaking. The podcast is the tenth in the series, Geographical Imaginations, so you have to scroll down, and it takes about a minute for the actual interview to start. Or listen here.
The map, “Fences,” from Denis’ Everything Sings, has been included in Cartographic Grounds from Princeton Architectural Press (2016). A collection of 170-some maps exploring the intersection of landscape architecture and maps, most are given individual full-page treatment. Here “Fences” – actually made by Helen Waldrop – is on page 228 accompanied by a nice description.
There’s lots new in the Making Maps: Third Edition, just released from Guilford Press. Denis and John have thoroughly revised a book that now bears only passing resemblance to the first edition of eleven years ago: revised chapter structure, new examples, much more color, an expanded comic strip, but in even fewer pages! This is not just another boring old cartography textbook. It’s a book about making maps!
Denis took part in the recent symposium in Mainz, Germany, Media’s Mapping Impulse, June 16-18, sponsored by Media Geography at Mainz (of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) and the University of Arizona, together with twenty-five others participants (including Tom Conley and Teresa Castro). Denis read “Mapping’s Complicated Media Impulse," which is here.
MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) has just released the hardbound edition of if its journal Humanities in which in 2015 Denis published his paper “Mapping Deeply.” Edited by Les Roberts and entitled Deep Mapping the volume collects the thirteen papers that made up the issue of the journal. Denis’ paper traces the history of the Boylan Heights mapping project that turned into his book, Everything Sings.
Denis participated in the “roundtable of experts” organized by Trevor Harris at the University of West Virginia, 23-24 May, to figure out what “deep mapping” really is. The participants, who included Nicholas Bauch, David Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, Rina Ghosh, Lincoln Mullen, Mia Ridge, and May Yuan, failed at their task, but spent their time profitably and pleasurably. Some sort of publication is sure to ensue.
Paul Voosen has just had his piece about the mapping controversy in Oaxaca published in The Chronicle of Higher Education (where he’s a senior reporter): "The Oaxaca Incident: a geographer’s efforts to map a Mexican village reveal the risks of military entanglement.” It covers the story from Peter Herlihy’s initial involvement in Tiltepec to the author’s recent visit. He also writes about Denis and Joe Bryan’s Weaponizing Maps.
A website run by a couple of Germans in Berlin, the idea list, has published a brief interview they recently conducted with Denis. In keeping with their theme of the month, it’s about the connection between maps and control.
The film about Denis, Unmappable, has just been posted on Vimeo! The twenty-two-and-a-half minute movie was made by Diane Hodson and Jasmine Luoma, and premiered last year at South by Southwest. Shown at more than thirty festivals (including Jena, Kosovo, and Guanajuato), the film also won numerous prizes. And now you can see it at home.
An interview with Denis was just published under the Life-Work tab at Inverse. Joe Carmichael asked a few more-interesting-than-usual questions and got the answers you might expect from Denis. Of course they’re all about maps …
Fed up with the simple-minded commentary he read about Star Wars in 1977, Denis wrote a piece for the Journal of Popular Film, then at Bowling Green University in Ohio. It came out in early 1978, one of the first serious pieces in what was soon to become a growth industry. Denis thought the film was great. Disturbed by the adulation that then greeted The Empire Strikes Back, Denis wrote a comparison of the two films, lamenting the sense of betrayal thatEmpire filled him with. Proposing a book on the topic to Oxford, Denis wrote a third piece, “The Times of the Stars,” that was never published (in the end Oxford declined to publish a book on so trivial a subject). All three pieces are here as well as in Papers under the Writing tab.
The map, “Signs for Strangers,” from Denis' Everything Sings, has been included in Map: Exploring the World, from Phaidon (2015). A collection of more than 300 maps from every age and the world over, each is given its individual full-page treatment. Here Denis’ map is on page 193 facing Guy Debord and Asger Jörn’s “The Naked City.” It’s a neat coupling.
In 1981 Denis, Vernon Shogren, and Paul Tesar, soon joined by Spencer Wolfe – all at the time members of the faculty of the School of Design at North Carolina State University – thought it was time for a biweekly pamphlet in which to articulate thoughts and opinions circulating through the school. As it turned out, it was too late to stop the movement backwards toward the 1950s sensibility the school would henceforth resolutely reassume. Denis had regularly been asked for copies of his piece, “Thoughts of a Dishes Washer,” and in the mid-1980s he put together this collection of his contributions. A recent request for the piece prompts this posting of “Denis Wood in Polemics.”
MOVA International has just posted a Q&A with Denis on its website. Among other things it includes a map Denis drew of Ideal Urb when he was in the fifth or sixth grade and a discussion of his first experience of cartography under George F. McCleary, then at Clark. There’s much more.
“Maps, Art, Power,” the paper Denis read in Rio de Janeiro in 2014, has been published in the 36th issue of the Brazilian journal Espaço e Cultura. Denis’ paper and Jörn Seemann’s are in English (despite its title), Carlos Lois (much better known as Carla Lois) and Veronica Hollman’s are in Spanish, and the balance are in Portuguese. Here’s a pdf of Denis’ paper, though without the 130 images with which it was accompanied in his oral presentation.
Denis’ brother, Peter, has just published a piece in the San Cristobal las Casas magazine, Jovel, laying out his thesis that Danish explorer and archaeologist Frans Blom was the real identity behind the author, B. Traven: “¿El tesoro de la Sierra Madre fue escrito en Nueva Orleans? B. Traven y ottos criollos famosos.” (We have a link to the full thesis further down this page.) While the piece runs pages 54-58, on this last page Peter reproduces this photo of himself (left), his brother Chris (right) and Denis (center) that was taken on a trip they took to the Lagos de Montebello, also in Chiapas, in 1963. Rumor has it that the magazine will be publishing an extract from the journal Denis kept that year in its next issue.
Denis’ paper, "Mapping Deeply,” has just been published in Humanities – a peer reviewed, online, open access journal – in a special issue devoted to deep mapping. Deep mapping is an aspect of the “spatial turn” the humanities have taken that rarely involves the making of actual maps. Denis’ neighborhood mapping project, published as Everything Sings, exemplifies a deep mapping project actually performed in mapping and maps. Download the pdf here.
Since taking first prize for documentary shorts in Victoria, Texas, unmappable has gone on to take the Young Grit Award at the Indie Grits Film Festival and the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Short at the Florida Film Festival. What a run Jasmine and Diane are having!! The image, from the film’s Facebook page, was made from a still from the film: Denis, at the time a teenager, filming himself in a mirror.
Denis’ new book, Weaponizing Maps, has just been published by Guilford Press. Co-authored with Joe Bryan, a geographer at the University of Colorado Boulder, Weaponizing Maps traces a genealogy from the founding of the American Geographical Society in 1851, "Red Mike" Edson’s patrols up Nicaragua’s Coco River in the 1920s, and the indigenous Nisa’a’s hundred-year fight to control their own land in British Columbia, to the twenty-first century mapping by the AGS and Peter Herlihy of land occupance in Oaxaca’s Sierra Juarez … for the US Army. “Bold and confrontational,” says Jeremy Crampton. “Bryan and Wood pull no punches in their indictment of the creeping militarization of geography … It’s quite possible that we’re seeing the next generation of critical thinking about mapping in this book.” To order through Amazon, click here. (The photo above shows the window of Boulder’s Innisfree Poetry Bookstore & Cafe.)
unmappable, the film about Denis, just won the prize for Best Documentary Short at the Victoria TX Independent Film Festival. Don’t Jasmine and Diane look happy?
Denis has contributed a piece to Cartographica’s commemoration of its publication, twenty-five years ago, of Brian Harley’s “Deconstructing the Map.” Denis and other contributors comment on the nature of Brian’s article, its impact, and the continuing reverberations. Denis’ contribution is here.
Propaganda Press has just published Denis' Everything Sings in Korean! It’s hardbound with a dust jacket and looks absolutely spectacular. If you scroll down through the Korean text, the site offers up eight pages of the atlas, all of which can be zoomed. Propaganda also publishes the magazine, Graphic, a recent issue of which is devoted to Maps and Sense.
Diane Hodson and Jasmine Luoma’s film about Denis, unmappable, has been selected for screening at SXSW in Austin next month. It’ll be shown on the 14th and 16th (with Denis in the audience!). This brings with it a new poster and the film’s own website (where the photo’s from). Make sure you check out the film’s Twitter site too. The film has also been selected for screening in April at the Florida Film Festival.
Denis read “Maps, Art, Power” on October 30 at the IX Simpósio Internacional sobre Espaço e Cultura, held at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Carla Lois, of Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council, also presented at thissession on cartographic representations of culture. Denis’ paper largely recapitulated the content of the seventh chapter of Rethinking the Power of Maps, with a few internal modifications and new opening and closing paragraphs. Here’s Denis with Veronica Hollman, from Buenos Aires, and their host in Rio, André Reyes Novaes.

Unmappable wins prize! at the New Orleans Film Festival, taking home a Gator for the Programmer's Artistic Award. Congratulations Diane, Jasmine!!!
The remarks Denis made last spring about Joel Wainwright’s Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought have just been published in Human Geography. Denis’ comments are here. The whole session, including Joel’s responses, is here.
The tease trailer for Unmappable has been released. The “blue sky” makes reference to a poem Denis composed. See more at the film’s Facebook page and at its Twitter site. Wired magazine has an interview with the filmmakers.
New Orleans Film Festival poster for Unmappable released! The poster frames the silhouette of Denis’ head stuffed with map images from Everything Sings.
Unmappable, the film Diane Hudson and Jasmine Luoma have made about Denis, is an Official Selection at the 2014 New Orleans Film Festival, October 16-23. This will be the film’s world premier. The festival’s synopsis reads: "Weaving together the life and work of psychogeographer and convicted sex offender Denis Wood, this meditative portrait unveils the inner workings of a man who unapologetically pushes boundaries both personally and professionally.” They do all this in 22 minutes.
Denis’ review of Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land, Writing, and Native Rule has just been published in the latest issue of Cartographica. More than a monograph about an intriguing old graphic, this is a book about what it is that makes a map a map.
The second, "The Commemorative Edition,” of Arthur Krim’s Route 66: Iconography of the American Highway, which Denis edited, has just been released by George F. Thompson books. Revised and updated, Route 66 has been enriched with additional photographs by Steve Fitch, Jim Farber, and others; and a new preface by Krim. The publication coincides with the Route 66 exhibition at the Autry National Center of the American West in Los Angeles.
Fleeting Glimpses is the name Denis gave the thesis he wrote for his master’s degree at Clark University. It’s an analysis of images of San Cristobal las Casas, in Chiapas, Mexico, held by students at the local secondary school. It set out to amend, or amplify, the approach Kevin Lynch had developed for the study of urban images in Image of the City but, more importantly, to get down Denis’ strong feelings for the place. The Clark University Cartographic Laboratory sold 200 copies of this predecessor to I Don’t Want To, But I Will. (It’s also posted on the Monographs page under the Writing tab.)
Denis helped celebrate the opening of Route 66 at the Autry National Center of the American West in Los Angeles June 6, 2014. Subtitled The Road and the Romance, and on view through January 4, 2015, the exhibition leans heavily on Arthur Krim’s Route 66: Iconography of the American Highway which Denis edited (a “Commemorative Edition” of the book is due out later this summer from George F. Thompson books). The show includes the original typewritten scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Woody Guthrie’s Martin guitar, the oldest existing Route 66 shield, and endless other artifacts related to the road. On June 22, Arthur Krim will participate in a seminar, Beginning the Road.
Jen Jack Gieseking and William Mangold, with Cindi Katz and others, have edited The People, Place, and Space Reader (Routledge, New York, 2014). The volume includes several pages from Denis and Robert Beck’s book, Home Rules (pp. 173-175), together with the plan of the living room that filled the endpapers of the book (p. 146).
Denis’ "Katy?”, an essay linking eighteen articles on cartography and narrative and appearing simultaneously in The Cartographic Journal and in New American Notes Online (NANO), has just been published by The Cartographic Journal (pp. 179-186). The version on NANO is forthcoming (its call for submissions is here: scroll down to Issue 6). The essay concludes: "The map contains all these events, all this passed time, sucks it up, inhales it … to comprise the narrative display that it is. And every map does this. Nice of the authors of these papers to to draw our attention, in all their various ways, to this fact!” (to read the essay, click here).
Denis' review of  Benedikt Groß and Joseph K. Lee's THE BIG ATLAS OF LA POOLS has just been published in the latest issue of Cartographica. The full atlas, documenting 43,123 Los Angeles pools, runs to 74 volumes, of which only a single hard copy exists; but the introductory volume, which is the real subject of Denis’ review, is available. It’s a hell of a book!
Denis participated in a panel on Joel Wainwright’s new book, Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought, at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, April 10, 2014, in Tampa. It was truly a first-rate panel organized by Johnny Finn for Human Geography, which will be publishing the remarks late this year. Denis' remarks are here.
Berkeley’s just announced the availability of the videos from its Mapping and Its Discontents Symposium at which Denis gave the framing lecture last November. The video of Denis is at the top of the page, where his talk starts about nine minutes in. You can watch the rest of the presenters, along with the concluding panel discussion further down the page.

The Rumpus has just posted a a long, rich review of Denis’ Everything Sings by Mieke Eerkens. She draws attention to the Modernist impulses behind the atlas. Eerkens teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.
Denis’ paper, “A Place Off the Map: The Case for a Non-Map-based Place Title,” has just been published in Nomadic and Indigenous Spaces: Productions and Cognitions, expertly edited by Judith Miggelbrink, Joachim Otto Habeck, Nuccio Mazzullo, and Peter Koch (Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey, 2013). The volume is actually worth its insane price, but the original draft of Denis’ paper is here.
In Search of Shadowed Spaces in Newcastle!! Michael writes: "In 2011, I wrote this article on urban exploration for a magazine who ultimately didn’t end up using it. I recently found it lying about on my hard-drive, polished it up a little and now here it is … preserved in the shoe-box, which I guess is my own little shadowed space.” Michael is writing about Arika’s Shadowed Spaces Tour, in Scotland, on which Denis lectured. This was the tour’s sole appearance in England. The photo is of Denis speaking under the unfinished bridge that Michael refers to toward the end of his piece.
Visual Editions has just published its latest incredible book, Where You Are. It's a box in which sixteen artists, writers, and thinkers explore the idea of the map in individually bound little books. Denis' expands on the piece he wrote about his paper routes for Pocket Guide – see below – with additional contributions– and maps! – from two fellow Plain Dealer carriers, Mouse (Mark Salling) and John Bellamy. For a peek, click here.
At Mapping and Its Discontents, a sold-out symposium held at Berkeley, November 1, 2013, Denis gave the opening, “framing” lecture on the history of mapmaking. Kicking off a 3.5 year, multi-university initiative sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, the symposium also heard Robin Grossinger, Laura Kurgan, Annette Kim, Katherine Harmon, Rebecca Solnit, and others talk about maps and mapping. It was accompanied by an interesting exhibition of student-made maps.
Dan Brownstein muses on Mapping and its Discontents.
Filmmakers Jasmine Luoma and Diane Hudson have been shooting a documentary about Denis scheduled for release in 2015. The untitled film has a Facebook page, Denis Wood Documentary, loaded with cool stuff, including shots of playing cards Denis made while working at Republic Steel in 1960s. And much else.

Denis presented “The Map's Power,” at Deutscher Geographentag 2013, in Passau, October 4, 2013.
The paper, tracing the history of his 1992 exhibition and book, The Power of Maps, is available here in longer and shorter versions. Mark Monmonier then presented "'Critical turn' or 'progressive turn'?"
A Notable Design Book of 2013! Designers & Books has listed Everything Sings as one of the Notable Design Books of 2013. Reviewer Allison Arieff says, "The narratives accompanying Wood’s maps tell a much deeper story of this North Carolina neighborhood than any 'normal' map ever could." She's an editor at SPUR, the former editor-in-chief for Dwell Magazine, writes for the New York Times, Atlantic Cities, and so on.
50th High School Reunion! Denis wrote a piece about one of his classmates, Dr. Norman Gordon, for his page in the class' "memory book." They went to school at Cleveland Heights High School, 1960-1963. Coincidentally, Norman is also the subject of his son, Austin Ratner's new novel, In the Land of the Living. Norman went on to Harvard and then medical school at Case-Western Reserve. He was poised to become a significant cancer researcher when he died of cancer at the age of 29.
More posts! Andrew Sullivan Dishes Everything Sings with the Detroit Geographical Expedition's map of where commuters used to kill black kids on the Pointes-to-downtown track. It's all beneath the headline, The Power of Maps. Good post!
Blog posts! The first, on Guernica/a magazine of arts and politics is about the second edition of Everything Sings, posting a bunch of images and an excerpt from Blake Butler's interview of Denis. The second, on geographical imaginations/war, space and security, finds Derek Gregory blogging about Bill Bunge, Everything Sings, and Denis and Joe Bryan's forthcoming book, Weaponizing Maps. Catch them while they're hot!

LOS ANGELES BOOK LAUNCH FOR THE SECOND EDITION OF EVERYTHING SINGS: THIS PAST APRIL AT THE LAST BOOKSTORE: DENIS WOOD IN CONVERSATION WITH THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK CRITIC DAVID ULIN. This evening of wide-ranging conversation between two writers with equally critical and imaginative faculties dug into Denis' process and influences as well the myriad connections his mapmaking draws between seemingly disparate things. The Last Bookstore, 453 S. Spring Street (near 5th Street), downtown Los Angeles. Ph: 213-488-0599.

See Excerpts Here.
Atlas Studio!! Denis spent the last week in February at the École de design of the Université du Québec à Montréal working with 27 graphic design, environmental design, and geography students on an atlas of Montréal: Subjectivité Géographique / Geographical Subjectivity. As it says at the end of the atlas, this was “a collective work of the DES32AT-080: Space Information Design intensive workshop students, supervised by Denis Wood and Alessandro Colizzi.” It was a lot of fun. Great students!!
Photo credit: Alessandro Colizzi
New publication! Denis' “Picturing Dogma: Kids Drawing the Earth,” the paper he presented in São Paulo in 2011, has just been published as "Dogma Visualizado: Estado-nação, Terra, Rios," the first chapter in Valéria Cazetta and Wenceslao M. de Oliveira, eds., Grafias do Espaco: Imagens da Educacåo Geográfica Contemporânea (Editora Alínea, Campinas (Brazil), 2013). The English version is here.
SECOND EDITION of Everything Sings, now available!! An expanded and revised second edition of Denis' Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas has just been published by siglio. It has ten new maps, two original essays, by Albert Mobilio and Ander Monson, and an interview with Denis by Blake Butler. Wrapped in a violet dust jacket, the book is bound in abrilliant yellow with grass green endpapers. It contains every bit of the first edition. Distributed by Artbook/D.A.P., it's for sale at siglio, Amazon, and elsewhere. Among the new maps are Dogs, Barking Dogs, Flowering Trees, Roof Lines, Stories, Families, Numbers, Footprints, and Nesting. The story of Boylan Heights grows more and more interesting!

Frans Blom in 1922.

Denis’s brother, Peter Wood, has finally figured out who B. Traven actually was. Peter has identified the Danish explorer and archaeologist Frans Blom, as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Death Ship, Rebellion of the Hanged and other Traven classics. Read the fascinating account of how and why Blom hid his authorship here.
Supposed portrait of B. Traven, actually Traven Torsvan, 1926.
The Junk School: An Evaluation of the First Year of the Worcester-Clark TTT Adjunct Program at North High School, Worcester, Massachusetts. Denis wrote this unpublished report in 1973 when he was with the old North High School in Worcester, Massachusetts as a Research Fellow-Teacher-Evaluator, supported by Clark University's Teaching Teacher Trainers Program and the University of Virginia's Evaluation Research Center. The Adjunct School was a radical attempt at reforming American high schools from within. It described itself as a change agent and assumed that knowledge was a process, that schools were learning communities, and that growth was really all that mattered in an education. The report proper is 204 pages and it's followed by another couple hundred pages of documentary material including weekly logs. The Adjunct School was … something else!
José Luis Romanillos reviews Rethinking the Power of Maps in the most recent issue of the Royal Dutch Geographical Society's Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie. It's pretty thorough. Check it out.
Korean! Denis and John Krygier's cartography text, Making Maps, has just been published in Korean by Sigma Press. They did a beautiful job! Visit them atwww.sigmapress.co.kr. 
Journal of Landscape Architecture (India) is doing a special issue around maps and Denis has written a little introduction for it called "About Maps."  Access the journal through its website at http://www.lajournal.in/default.htm.

Denis reads "1,001 Regional Nights" in Leipzig, at the Public Colloquium of the Center for Area Studies of the University of Leipzig, December 12, 2012. His concern here is to dismiss as a phantom the idea of coherent geographical regions, replacing them with a study of regions determined by tossing embroidery hoops onto maps.

Blog post! Northern Michigan University has just posted Denis' article, "The Cartographic Mode of Production" on its Passages Northblog. In this Denis applies Jonathan Beller's "attention theory of value" to the way location is turned into capital by maps, especially mobile map platforms like foursquare. Check it out. Then read Beller's terrific book.
Pocket Guide has published Denis' "Thinking about my paper routes," along with this map he doodled of them in 1976 while listening to a lecture. An expanded version of this with the counter-memories of others and their maps will come out in 2013 from London's Visual Editions.
Denis reviews R. Brook and N. Dunn's unfathomably dull Urban Maps: Instruments of Narrative and Interpretation in the City. The review's in Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 39(3), 2012, p. 606.

Denis' article, "The Anthropology of Cartography" has just been published in Les Roberts' collection Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (Hampshire), 2012), pp. 280-303. Les is in the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool so this is not your usual cartography anthology but lots more interesting.
Veronica Hollman reviews Everything Sings for Estudios Socioterritoriales: Revista de Geografía No. 11 (Buenos Aires, enero-junio 2012), pp. 127-133.
MetaFilter loves Denis' dissertation.
Invisible Cities on BBC’s Between the Ears! Denis joins Bradley Garrett, Anna Minton, Rebecca Solnit, and PD Smith in a tribute – a sound collage – to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities on the 40th anniversary of its publication. Produced by Eleanor McDowall and first broadcast on BBC 3’s Between the Ears, June 3, 2012. It was rebroadcast August 31, 2014, on the Australian program, Soundproof.
Car thieves stole our manuscript!! An early – and only – copy of this manuscript, A Cognitive Atlas: Explorations into the Psychological Geography of Four Mexican Cities, was locked in the trunk of David Stea’s car to make sure thieves intent on cameras and the like didn’t inadvertently steal it while we were eating. What they stole was the whole car! The atlas is mostly David’s. He’d completed his work on Mexico City, Puebla, and Guanajuato before arriving at Clark University in the fall of 1967 to teach psychogeography. Denis enrolled in the two semester course and in the spring did the work reported here on San Cristobal las Casas. David folded this into his developing manuscript – the one that was stolen – and following further difficulties he and Denis decided to … just get it out. Hence this 1971 report. (Denis returned to San Cristobal in the summer of 1969 and did the further work reported in his master thesis, Fleeting Glimpses, soon to be posted here.)
Review: Denis' review of Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader has just been published in Cartographica.
Dissertation Online!!! Denis' notorious I Don't Want To But I Will is now available here (or find it on the Monographs page under the Writing tab) as a machine-searchable PDF. Submitted in 1973 as published by the Clark University Cartographic Laboratory in an edition of 200 (long, long sold out) it is reproduced here in its original, extremely hard-to-find form. It's about psychogeography! It's about mental maps!! It's about a summer in Europe!!!

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© Denis Wood 2010 - 2021