Aesthetics and Cartography: Post-Critical Reflections on Deviance in and of Representations

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a good paper that makes a much-needed contribution towards understanding the philosophical and sociological foundations of aesthetics in cartography. 

My only real criticism is the link between the theoretical background (which is extensive) to the application of these concepts to cartographically informed representations in AR and VR. Some images to illustrate examples of the concepts (such as the picturesque, sublime, and so on) would also be helpful.

The standard of English is very high. Only noticed that in line 164, the term 'unity in multiplicity' is repeated.

Author Response

Thank you very much for the very positive evaluation of our manuscript. As you suggested, we added images to better illustrate our examples. Two figures are now integrated into section 5. They are intended to visualize our VR examples. The repetition of the mentioned term was corrected.

Figure 1. A multisensory urban traffic situation for immersive VR experience. (Source: Marco Weißmann & Dennis Edler)

Figure 2. An oblique bird’s eye view on a post-industrial area in the Ruhr Valley represented in immersive VR. Buildings of the industrial past are preserved and integrated into the landscape architectural setting of the present. (Source: Timo Wiedenlübbert & Dennis Edler)

Reviewer 2 Report

Reading an article that brings aesthetic and modern research issues into cartography is a pleasure. I understand this article as a review article in which the authors provide and discuss the concept of deviant cartography and aesthetics, as the authors said: "Aesthetics between philosophical foundations and social distinctions." The authors explained the concepts of functional, dysfunctional, a-functional, and meta-functional deviant cartography related to deviant cartographies. The literature review, the presentation of the state-of-art research on Cartography, is well described. The authors have written the literature review based on important scientific literature, which makes the article a good source of scientific references. As I am not an expert on Philosophy or Social Science, I cannot make any critic about sessions 2 and 3. However, I could learn about it, which made me think about the importance of critically analyzing the application of the theory of cartography in countries and societies that have developed research on cartography for a few decades. The theory of cartography has been built in countries and societies where it has been developed for centuries. Relating to "Operationalization of Aesthetic References in Cartography," my country's first 300 years of Portuguese colonization (Brazil) had happened without any map. While the Map of France of Cassini was built in the XVIII century, Brazil's first astronomical determination of latitude (in just one geodetic bench) took place in around 1790. The Brazilian territory was known at 1:1.000.000, the largest scale available at the time, only in 1922. On the other hand, research works like this can stimulate cartographers of colonized countries to integrate the knowledge about aesthetics as solutions for cartographic symbols for their countries' mapping based on their cultures and Histories. The article can also be a source of bibliographic research since the authors include representative and extensive scientific literature about concepts of philosophical and sociological aesthetics they propose to be considered and discussed in the research on Cartography that aims for new approaches and solutions for map design. Some writing issues have editing problems, such as duplication of words or missing words in some sentences.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your positive evaluation of our approach.

We have thoroughly revised the language of the article once again, simplified complicated sentences and added some explanations. In addition, we have had the text final proofread by a native speaker.

Beyond this article, it would be a pleasure to get in touch with you for an exchange about cartographic aesthetic research. If you are interested, please get in touch with us and we will certainly find a good opportunity for discussions.

We consider the reference to Brazil to be particularly valuable that we do not want to mention it as a side aspect in this article. Perhaps we should consider together how we can deal with this topic more comprehensively.

Reviewer 3 Report

Reading this article slowly and carefully, I think that "anesthetization" should be made the focus. It duplicates, at the core, arguments presented in a recent KN article by the same authors. The reflections tend to be polemic and build on a highly unreflected theoretical foundation (one monograph by Baumgarten in German without contextualization is the most important work on aesthetics?), and the presentation is very rough.  It's very confusing to understand points, and the structure does not help. The assertions about critical cartography fundamentally ignore that discourse and publications. Coupled with a willful(?) neglect of the developments of social construction since the 1970s, the article is a nice personal essay but lacks fundamentally in many ways. 

Author Response

First of all, we wish to apologize that we anesthetized you with our article. It seems that the reviewers reacted differently to our paper, in terms of the subject matter and language. We would like to respond to your different points of criticism, and we hope that you accept our (obviously different) view on the topic:

# 1: It duplicates, at the core, arguments presented in a recent KN article by the same authors.

Answer: We agree that this manuscript is built on a quite recently published idea of “Deviant Cartographies” (KN article). However, the KN article deals with the derivation of the idea (deviant cartographies) using the sociological concept of deviance and Ralf Dahrendorf’s approach to life chances. This liberal perspective, in some ways, contradicts established rather neo-Marxist views of Critical Cartography, especially in the 1980s. Based on this, we suggest the continuation of thinking of a more liberal post-critical cartography. This may overcome dysfunctional (deviances), from today’s perspective, leftovers from critical cartography, such as its rigorism related to the idea of a power-bound nature of maps (which can hardly be seen in modern developments, especially in those being related to open data and open software initiatives where National Agencies and software companies share their instruments of defining power relations).

This manuscript, no doubt, is in line with this argumentation. It is important that the readers of this paper get chance to understand this way of arguing, as it is related to the post-critical reflections of aesthetics in sections 4, 5 and 6. Therefore, the concept of deviance (which can only hardly been found in cartographic theory) is also part of this manuscript (section 2). Finally, we would like to stress that the research focus of this paper is the post-critical reflection of aesthetics in cartography, and the topic of aesthetics was not addressed in the KN article.

# 2: The reflections tend to be polemic and build on a highly unreflected theoretical foundation (one monograph by Baumgarten in German without contextualization is the most important work on aesthetics?), and the presentation is very rough.

Answer: In the introduction, we have explained Baumgarten's importance for the development of philosophical aesthetics and proved it with the help of several sources. With Baumgarten began the transition from an object- to a subject-orientation of aesthetics, which accounts for his importance.

We added: “Until the 18th century, the old European notion of the unity of the true, the beautiful, and the good dominated (e.g., in [10] [11]). Aesthetics, as an independent philosophical discipline, emerged only in the modern era [12,13]. The work 'Aesthetica' by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten [14] introduced a new way of thinking about the aesthetic that "increasingly displaced the paradigm of an ontologically based theory of the beautiful that had survived from antiquity and the Middle Ages" [15]. Baumgarten's re-flections on aesthetics can be understood as a fundamental turn in the approach to aesthetics, since he upgraded sensuality to the medium of cognition [16].”

In an article in a professional journal in which aesthetics is the basis of considerations, but operationalization in relation to cartography is the central theme, it is difficult to condense the history of philosophical aesthetics.

# 3: It's very confusing to understand points, and the structure does not help.

Answer: This is really difficult for us to understand what exactly you refer to. We believe that the structure is logically coherent and supports the way we argue. Statements of the other reviewers confirm our approach of structuring the manuscript and making our points, especially at the end of the sections. 

#4: The assertions about critical cartography fundamentally ignore that discourse and publications.

Answer: We already introduced the established core messages of critical cartography in our introduction and refer to highly cited publications by leading authors, such as John Harley, Jeremy Crampton, and Denis Wood. We refer back to this key messages in our discussion and conclusion section.

[17] Harley, B.J. Deconstructing the map. In The new nature of maps. Essays in the history of cartography; Laxton, P., Ed.; John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2002; pp 149–168.

 [18] Wood, D.; Fels, J. Design on Signs/Myth and Meaning in Maps. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 1986, 23, 54–103, doi:10.3138/R831-50R3-7247-2124.

 [19] Crampton, J.; Krygier, J. An Introduction to Critical Cartography. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 2005, 4, 11–33.

 [20] Wood, D.; Krygier, J. Cartography: Critical Cartography. International Encyclopedia of Human Geography 2009, 345–357.

 [21] Wood, D. Cartography is Dead (Thank God!). CP 2003, 4–7, doi:10.14714/cp45.497. 

In addition, however, we have included a reference to more recent developments:

“In contrast to a cartography (powerfully) executed by trained cartographers, a 'counter-mapping' executed by inequalities affected persons themselves is now favored (see for instance: [22–26].”

# 5: Coupled with a willful(?) neglect of the developments of social construction since the 1970s, the article is a nice personal essay but lacks fundamentally in many ways.

Answer: It was not our intention to neglect important developments of social construction since the 1970s. We refer our argumentation to numerous new publications. Moreover, we consider and also apply recent publications of sociological and philosophical (e.g. deviance, aesthetics) research contributing to social constructivism. Thank you for calling our article a “nice personal essay”. In our opinion, this manuscript (built on more than 130 references) is not an essay, but as a research manuscript.

Reviewer 4 Report

The article discusses the issue of modern cartography in an extremely theoretical manner. It has the advantage of a rich literature review and philosophical justifications for the concepts described by the authors. However, in the reviewer's opinion, the article is very hermetic and difficult to read. It would have been preferable if the summary of the article and, at least in part, its conclusion had been written in a more understandable way for the audience.

In the reviewer's opinion, it would also be INCREDIBLY important to point out examples of cartographic studies with the features described in the article. A pictorial form (e.g., maps or geo-information portals) would enable visual perception of the authors' judgments.

Author Response

Thank you very much for pointing out advantages and weaknesses of our manuscript. We tried to reduce the hermetic character (as you point it out) of the text to offer a better readability. We went carefully through the entire text and changed the formulation of our sentences. Moreover, we asked a native speaker to read our manuscript and incorporated his suggestions in the new manuscript version.

As also pointed out by Reviewer 1, you highlight the importance of giving examples in a pictorial form. Therefore, we included figures 1 and 2 in section 5.

Figure 1. A multisensory urban traffic situation for immersive VR experience. (Source: Marco Weißmann & Dennis Edler)

Figure 2. An oblique bird’s eye view on a post-industrial area in the Ruhr Valley represented in immersive VR. Buildings of the industrial past are preserved and integrated into the landscape architectural setting of the present. (Source: Timo Wiedenlübbert & Dennis Edler)

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

I think the changes are positive, but some misunderstandings, in my opinion, remain—no need to belabour the specifics. The changes allow me to focus on issues that I think considering and addressing can lead to a publishable paper that is understandable to most readers and has more impact. 

1) The points in this numbered response are unclear to me and reflect issues I have with the manuscript. Is critical cartography finished? Are deviances dysfunctional? Is Critical Cartography Neo-Marxist? What does “rather Neo-Marxist” mean? Since most critical mapping is done outside government agencies, how are open data and open software initiatives “defining power relations”? 

2) Maybe Baumgarten is a critical text. Undoubtedly, his work among philosophers working on aesthetics is widely known in Germany. That does not make it possible to “prove” Baumgarten’s book’s importance. If it is crucial for the field of aesthetics, the change from object- to subject-orientated aesthetics will include other works. Without citing them, all the reader has is your assertion. Beyond Baumgarten, all the text cites is an edited text from him in a collection. Please add citations, especially from the last 10-20 years, that point the reader to works that show the importance of the change you point to, not Baumgarten, and preferably relevance for cartography. That might include an English-language reference which addresses the history of aesthetics. 

3) The text improvements make the text easier to follow. The problem with following the rhetoric and introducing new concepts (“canonisation”, p. 11, for example) still impedes understanding the text. 

4) Critical cartography is not monolithic. There are many approaches, and the “key messages” are selective and possibly biased in any case, including other literature beyond the cited papers, which sometimes also considers aesthetics (Sebastian Caquard’s work in particular or Matt Wilson’s publications). Also, significant work appeared after 2009, which is highly relevant to the arguments about perception (publications by Luke Bergman, David O’Sullivan and others) for the presentation, the paper’s logic and addressing contemporary issues. 

5) Moving from the distinction of object- to subject-orientated aesthetics and then positing the “social construction of aesthetic judgements” (p. 5), later introducing “world construction” (p. 8) and using the term “aesthetic construction” (numerous pages) produces a muddle. Either the missing connection between philosophical aesthetics and cartographic aesthetics needs more careful untangling of social construction as a philosophical topic and social science approach, or the term construction should be replaced by a term more specific to the lost connection. Since you only consider social construction in one place in the manuscript, which is already complicated, that might be preferable. 

Additional comments

6) Please clarify what “functional and meta-functional deviances” (p. 2) refer to in terms of “contingent thinking” (p. 2, only used as a term here). The discussion on p. 3 conjoins the terms.

7) what is the connection between functional deviances, contingent thinking and aesthetics? The discussion of aesthetics on p. 4ff lacks any engagement with deviance or contingent thinking. On p. 6, the text returns to the connection, but only in an asserted connection in cartography, which relies solely on the muddled construction concept. 

8) On p. 6, functionality receives a new definition: “This functionality arises not least from the fact that it enables a connection to research in social and cultural sciences”. Before, there was a clear association with “contingent thinking”, and I think visual perception is a different type of connection than specific sciences. As it stands, the evocation of functionality in its relationship to aesthetics remains confusing. In this light, I think removing or revising the discussion of social construction could be called for. If social construction remains in the text, please cite cartography or, at least, geography examples. 

9) Dealing with the above points necessitates revising the conclusion based on the clarified presentation of concepts and their connections. 

Finally, academics indeed hold different views, philosophies and ideologies, which is good for a diversity of approaches and for strengthening academia. What I offer as a reviewer is a critical opinion on the rhetoric and arguments in the process of scientific publishing. In this sense, I find the submission confusing and even very misleading, which is not acceptable to scientific communication. 

Reviewer 4 Report

The article has been significally improved.