Culture of the Wisconsin Official State Highway Map

Authors

  • Mark H. Bockenhauer St. Norbert College, De Pere, WI

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14714/CP18.929

Keywords:

cullture, highway map, Wisconsin

Abstract

Wood and Fels (1986) strikingly reveal that even a cartographic product as "taken for granted" as a road map is as much a tool of the maker as of the user. Indeed, a highway map comprises a sophisticated package of messages. In this paper, a series of State of Wisconsin official highway maps is examined to illustrate that each is a product of the culture in which it is produced. Map messages reflecting state institutional cultures are communicated through the principal state map image as well as through other map elements. Examples are selected from the 1920s to the present to highlight a changing transportation and mapmaking culture, appropriation of the official state highway map as a tool of tourism and gubernatorial promotion, and the presence of certain persistent and disturbing depictions of women and minorities. Wisconsin's official highway map is found to include both deliberate and unintentional reflections of the changing (and in some aspects, unchanging) state of the state.

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Published

1994-06-01

How to Cite

Bockenhauer, M. H. (1994). Culture of the Wisconsin Official State Highway Map. Cartographic Perspectives, (18), 3–16. https://doi.org/10.14714/CP18.929

Issue

No. 18 (1994)

Section

Featured Articles

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