Navigation, boundaries and beauty - it all comes together in maps. Beyond its role as a directional instrument - a map can be an artistic mosaic, revealing the unique character of a chosen landscape in precise detail.

Maps also are coded descriptions of culture.  Through arrays of information and imagery that are collected and informed by the community, maps can diagram social as well as geographical terrain, in traditional and abstract ways.

This BorderLore edition focuses on cartographic expression as it relates to connecting experience and place - how mapping is a visualization of relationships, a plotting of personal worlds, and a drawing of pictorial insights into community identity through space, taste, people, arts, geography and culture:

There are stories waiting to be revealed in the visible and invisible landscapes around us. And culture is a pervasive reality that helps navigate all the worlds we map.

"Mapping our cultures in all their 360 degrees and in their depth, keeping our diverse stories and multiple histories interrogating and renewing each other, is a key cultural function of our time."

--  Greg Young, Cultural Mapping in the Global World
(2003 Association of Southeast Asian Countries Education Ministers Conference)

But, be warned, "...the map is not the territory."

-- Polish-American engineer and scholar  Alfred Korzybski,