A Comment on Colonialism

Colonialism from BK on Vimeo.

Project A: Decoding the Map

Decoding a Map

EverQuest : Shadows of Luclin

EverQuest is an 3D online game that was first released in 1999 by Sony Online Entertainment and have been one of the most successful text-based MUD of all time.  The purpose of the map is solely to target those who take part in the game or have interest in the game. 

If you look for more potential clues in the map, we can clearly see that its a map that resemble the world map that we know. 

As we look closer into the map, there is one thing which is very prominent, which is that it might look like a world map, but there are elements within the map that are mythical and non-existing.  

But at the same time, the places and the regions are defined not only by their names but also by the kind of terrain or environment and the ‘things’ they have, which take us to the iconic nature of the map. 

At the top of the page is the title or the name of the map. This can be the linguistic code of the map. 

and looking at the map itself as an  object is very organized, ordered and arranged, which tells us that it was made for the purpose of presenting to its audience and it was made in a way that it looks clean and organized and not all over the place and looking at the quality of the paper, it is evident that it was mass produced too. 

There have more twenty expansions of the game with an average of two expansions per year and the latest one is Everquest: Empires of Kunark. 

So to conclude the decoding of the map, it wont be wrong to say that its an extra significant map, since it talks about mythical storyline and since it tis made for a certain audience to it has presentation quality or code to it. And there is definitely the iconic element there since it has the things and terrains in it. The map also has a name which makes it of linguistic code. 

The mythical and out of the world feel and content of the map makes it a rhetorical map. 

Reading #1: We Live In A Visual World

We live in a visual world. We are surrounded by increasingly sophisticated visual images. But unless we are taught how to read them, we run the risk of remaining visually illiterate. This is something that none of us can afford in the modern world.

During our lives, we are usually taught how to read the printed word. We are shown how sentences are made up of grammatical units. We learn how to read as well as write. Things are much less straightforward in the visual world. Often, we are left on our own when it comes to figuring out what a visual image means.

That is what this book is about. This is a book that explores how meaning is both made and transmitted in the visual world. It seeks not simple solutions to particular and individual images. Rather, it aims to show us ways of looking for ourselves so that we will be able to tackle any visual text — whether it is a drawing, a painting, a photograph, a film, an advertisement, a television programme or a new media text — and be able to start getting to grips with both what it means and how that meaning is communicated, even how some images give away far more in meaning than their authors ever consciously intended.

Those of us who are already creatively involved in the visual arts, or are planning a professional career in the media or communications industries, will need little convincing of the need for visual literacy. Creatively, we need to be able to 'read' as well as 'write', to learn how others have communicated visually in order, in turn, to learn from them. Further, we need to know how others will read our work, be they consumers, clients or critics. We need to be practically accomplished in these skills in order to make a living from them.

Long before photography, it was usual for artists to paint battles — usually to the gratification of the winning side. Later, official war artists would sketch or paint on location, and then their work would be engraved for newspaper reproduction. With photojournalism, people began to see what war actually looked like for the first time. Particular images began to take on iconic significance.

The pictures that depict our world are not necessarily moving pictures, despite the pre-eminence of television, cinema and related media. Newspaper and magazine photographs remain important, and have a 'fixity' that gives them more staying power than a fleeting, moving image. Just as in television, however, the images are by no means secondary to the words. Newspaper editors know this: the lead picture will always be above the front-page fold so that it attracts our attention on the news-stand. One hardly needs to stress the importance of the cover photograph of a magazine, no matter how fashionable or weighty its content.

Visual images, however, are by no means limited to the news media. They surround us every day in advertising, on packaging, on banknotes and on CD covers. They all have something to say, whether they are as informal as family snapshots or as imposing as art gallery canvases.

Try to imagine a world without visual culture. It is impossible. If we doubt this, we should just close our eyes for half an hour, or (on the other hand) walking down the street making a mental note of every form of visual communication that we see. Imagine, next, the same brief walk without the visual images.

This book was going to be all about art history, but traditional history of art gets little attention in it. But this book aims to open ones eyes and urge them to not be visually illiterate.

Reading #1: Rethink the Power of Maps

Legends or keys are naturally indispensable to most maps, since they provide the explanations of the various symbols used but this is largely untrue. Legends are more often dispensed with than not, and they never provide explanations of more than a fraction of the "symbols" found on the maps to which they refer. The fact that legends accompany neither topographic survey sheets nor the plates of most atlases makes this perfectly plain. That legends do exist for these maps, someplace in the book, or by special order, only serves to underscore through their entirely separate, off-somewhere-else character exactly show how dispensable they are. Technically no symbol that is not self-explanatory should be used on a map unless it is explained in a legend, the fact is that NO symbol explains itself any more than the words of an essay bother to explain themselves to the reader. Most readers make it through most essays and maps because as they grew up into their common culture they learned the significance of most of the words and map symbols. But this familiarity with signs on the part of the reader never becomes a property of the mark; even the most transparent sign is opaque to those unfamiliar with the code.

It is not, then, that maps don't need to be decoded; but that they are by and large encoded in signs as readily interpreted by most map readers. So why don't they? It's not, certainly, because they're self-explanatory. No matter how many readers are convinced that blue naturally dictates water, or that little pictograms of lighthouses and mountains explain themselves, signs are not signs for, dissolve into marks for, those who don't know the code.

This will be difficult for many to accept, but once it is understood that the role of the legend is less to elucidate the "meaning" of this or that posting than to function as a sign in its own right, this conclusion is even more difficult to evade.

An example from a wholly different domain, an especially innocuous one, is given in Barthes's reading of a Latin sentence, "quia ego nominor leo," in a Latin grammar: There is something ambiguous about this statement: On the one hand, the words in it do have a simple meaning: because my name is lion. And on the other, the sentence is evidently there in order to signify something else to me.

Which is myth's way: the map is always there to deny that the significations piled on top of it. I mean, it's only a map, and general pretense is that it's innocent, a servant of that eye that sees things as they really are. But as we have seen, outside of the world or maps states carry on a precarious existence. Little of nature, states are much of maps, and only when it is acknowledged how fragile is the existence or an unmapped state.

That it would be difficult to produce a state highway map without highways I admit, but there is no injunction on the state to map its roads anymore than there is for it to map the locations of deaths attributable to motor vehicles, or the density of cancer-linked emissions from internal combustion engines, or the extent of noise pollution associated with automotive traffic. It would be gratifying to live in a state that produced 1.75 million copies of such maps and distributed them free of cost to travelers, tourists, immigrants, and industrial location specialists, but states find it more expedient to publish maps of highways.

Reading #1: New Nature of Maps

(the aim of the blog is to post a reflection of a reading and what i gathered from it. Opinions are my own and you can disagree with it)


Map interpretation usually implies a search for geographical features. It does not convey though, how a manipulated form of knowledge over the course of history has helped shape those features. So how can we make maps speak about the worlds of the past as it was, this article explores.

The main crux of this article dictates that there are three main points that specify the ideological contours of the maps :

 1.Viewing maps as a kind of language .

2. A map can carry in its image such symbolism as associated with particular area.

3. Third aspect is about sociology of knowledge, meaning map knowledge is a social product as mentioned before.

Cartography can be a form of knowledge and a power as well .Historian paints the colors of the past in its own light. Iconological study is only through context, context here can be defined as the circumstances in which maps were made. Such details only can tell us about real motives behind it.

For instance in Islamic world, Caliphs ,Ottoman empire and Mughal emperors in India were known to patronize map making and use maps to their own particular advantages be it military, social or religious .

In ancient China, maps were used according to the policies of rulers . In early modern Europe, from Italy to Netherlands and from Scandinavia to Portugal ,it was practiced almost everywhere.

Structure usually favored social elites .As much as guns and warships, maps have been the weapon of imperialism. Through content n it's representation, making and using of maps has been influenced by ideology yet it can only be right fully understood in specific historical situations.

In conclusion, ‘History is written by the victors' by Winston Churchill explains it all. Map making was always done to glorify social elites and to pacify the military religious or social propaganda of rulers of those areas and times.