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NEWS
 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. |
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| 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!! |
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| Photo credit: Alessandro Colizzi |
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| 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. |
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 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 a brilliant 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! |
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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. |
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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! |
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| 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. |
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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. |
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 Forest Purnell uses Everything Sings in Zamboanga! As part of an Institute of Infinitely Small Things residency in Zamboanga, Mindanao, in the Philippines, Forest Purnell uses maps from Everything Sings to prompt maps from participants of smells, haunted areas, places you can feel the wind, garbage, dating areas, gloomy places, and so on.
View full set.
View additional image. |
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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.
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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.
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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. |
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| 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. |
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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.
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| Veronica
Hollman reviews
Everything Sings for Estudios Socioterritoriales: Revista
de Geografía No. 11 (Buenos Aires, enero-junio 2012),
pp. 127-133. |
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| MetaFilter
loves
Denis' dissertation. |
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| 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. |
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| 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.) |
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| Review:
Denis' review of Mapping
Latin America: A Cartographic Reader has just been
published in Cartographica. |
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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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| Talk:
New York, Friday, February 24, 6 - 8 p.m. Denis Wood at Printed
Matter — Denis will begin by talking about Everything
Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas and then the conversation
will digress. His conversation partner is TBA. Check the Siglio
News & Events page online for an update after Feb. 17. Printed
Matter, 195 Tenth Avenue, New York. Contact Keith Gray, Events
Coordinator: keith@printedmatter.org |
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| Conversation:
Boston, Wednesday, February 22, 7 - 9 p.m. The Power of
Mapping — a OneBook book club discussion with Denis
Wood and Catherine D’Ignazio about their respective entries
in the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography as well
as about the practice, technique, and theory behind research
mapping. Hosted by Artists in Context, an organization that
supports multi-disciplinary endeavors by artists and thinkers
to invent alternative approaches to existing societal challenges.
At the Design Studio for Social Intervention, 1946 Washington
Street, 2nd Floor, Boston. RSVP to: Max Roberts-Zirker, Program
Coordinator, Artists in Context, max@artistsincontext.org |
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| Presentation:
Boston, Wednesday, February 21, Denis will talk about
Critical Cartography, Participatory Mapping and
Weaponizing Maps, in conjunction with the course
Workshop II CMS-951 taught by Catherine D'Ignazio MIT.
Open to the Media Lab, Comparative Media Studies, and
the Civic Media group. Free pizza.
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image for larger version. |
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Exhibition:
Ground Truth: Mapping the Senses/Charting Experience,
an exhibition of map art at the Housatonic Museum of
Art, included six of the maps from Denis’ narrative
atlas, Everything Sings (January 13-February
10, 2012), in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Click
image for larger version. |
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Publication:
An excerpt from John Krygier and Denis’ comic
book about maps, C’est n’est pas le
monde, has just appeared in the latest issue of
PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers,
#15. The whole issue is devoted to maps (in one
form or another).
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image for larger version. |
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Presentation
(Follow-Up): Denis presented “Picturing Dogma:
Kids Drawing the Earth” at the
II International Colloquium on Education
through Images and their Geographies
(7-11 November) at the University of
São Paulo (Brazil). The four
day conference was both intense and
stimulating. The proceedings will be
published. |
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© Denis Wood 2010
- 2013 |
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