Maps have been around since the beginning of time and are essential to everyone’s daily lives. Maps have always been in the background, of today’s societies especially, and something, not most people think about. When you think about maps you think of a tool that gets you from one place to the next or shows land but Denis Wood describes in the chapter “Cartography and the Death of Mapping,” that maps are so much more than just that. As a society we have all agreed on most mapping systems but that that doesn’t mean everyone agrees with the way things are mapped. Counter-mapping is the protestation of the way things are mapped or layed out. Counter- mappers question the authority of who has the right to lay out the land, give it names and divide it up. This development led to the created of protest maps. These new maps were used to fight against the government planned mapping and create a layout of their own in protest. But protest maps can be used as a protestation of many things and not just layout of streets or property. Protest maps main purpose is to demonstrate any wrong in society. Wood talks about using them as a way to show data in a visual way and to show what is happening in certain areas. Protest maps can also simply be used to show where a protest march is happening or what its route is as a source of information to the public. Maps are so simple but so important in so many ways. The uses are endless and can even make a difference.
