Introduction

When we imagine a map, what likely comes to mind is a geographical representation – a visual survey of land, perhaps of a vast uninhabited countryside tract, or a small but densely-populated urban area. Through the map, rivers, mountains, and forests, roads, bridges, and canals – the natural and built environment – are brought together and inscribed in two dimensions. Complex landscapes and constant undulations are all measured and made rational as an image on paper, or increasingly, in various digital forms on our phone.

Perhaps, also, the map imagined may not be solely geographical and descriptive in nature. For example, it might supplement geographical data with social information to create something different. This could be a global map of extreme poverty, a US map of gerrymandering, an EU map of regional vulnerabilities, a map of London’s trees – complete with location and species information – or a mapping of the correlation between politicians’ body-mass index and political corruption (Blavatskyy, 2021). Almost any conceivable (and inconceivable) metric has been or could be mapped – and there is seemingly no end to the “strange maps” being created.

It is worth considering, however, that “images are never neutral platforms for the transmission of facts but always frame and guide a process of interpretation that cannot be under full authorial control” (Rankin, 2020). Maps likewise “are never value-free images.” Instead, they are “a way of conceiving, articulating, and structuring the human world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon particular sets of social relations” (Harley, 2001). And as we have become increasingly wary of the purported neutrality of cartography, cartographers, and maps themselves, so too have we become attuned to the politics of map-making and the various techniques by which maps can be moulded to manipulate and mislead (Monmonier, 2018). The problem with maps, as Harvey observed, is that they are “typically totalizing, usually two-dimensional, Cartesian, and very undialectical devices with which it is possible to propound any mixture of extraordinary insights and monstrous lies” (1996).

Mapping the Field

Beyond the geographic and the social, what other terrains might we map? Could we survey and visualise intellectual landscapes, and if we did, would such maps encounter the same pitfalls as those discussed above? Moreover, would a disciplinary cartography actually benefit the field of study mapped – and if so, in what ways?

Sandoz’s illuminating offers a helpful starting point. This compendium gathers a host of attempts to categorise disciplines from over the centuries, many by extraordinary minds and by polymaths in their own right. Such taxonomies are always interesting, although the passage of time has not been equally kind to all disciplines. For Pliny the Elder, for example, “Grammar” was a Science whereas “Engineering” an Arts discipline. As times have changed so too have our classifications – and the relative importance of certain fields has waxed or waned. Few today would argue ‘Gnomonics’ (the Art of sundials) is the equal of engineering or geometry. Yet these snapshots survive as time-capsules for a present-day archaeology of knowledge (Foucault, 2002) – a glimpse of unconscious or perceived relationships and understandings of intellectual hierarchies

From the vantage point of today, some of these , especially when one considers the scholarly variety ongoing within most academic departments. One may find “law” in a classification, but is unlikely to find the sub-disciplines many of us call home. These maps are typically outward-facing, capable of illustrating (such as “legal history” being located under the umbrella of “law”), and those upon which knowledge claims might rely. In a sense, what they tell us about a given field is only that which can be inferred from its supposed proximity to other (sometimes better defined and more clearly located) fields.

However, such maps fail most often through their inability to capture interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Such work, increasingly commonplace and likely only to proliferate further, represents ‘mixtures, composites, and other mental mongrels’ which ‘of course, inevitably threaten the cognitive tranquility of anyone committed to such a rigidly compartmentalized view of the world’ (Zerubavel, 1995). Not only does such scholarship not fit in, its very existence perturbs classification more broadly – rendering many hard boundaries in disciplinary mapping unsound if not obsolete. 

But there are also maps more inward-looking in nature – those which we might conceive of as “deep maps,” or products of “deep mapping” (Roberts, 2024). Although all mapping requires looking, deep mapping demands heightened scrutiny, a closer reading of the landscape and the multiplicity of relationships therein. Such maps may then chart the constituent components that make up a discipline: how these fit together, how they may interact, where fruitful exchange is currently taking place, and where more interaction may prove beneficial in future (see e.g., Börner, 2010).

Mappng Law and the Humanities

The Law and the Humanities Infrastructure Map arose through a collaboration between LHub – the Law and the Humanities Hub at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies – and the Mapping the Arts and Humanities project team (MAHP). Building upon the work of MAHP, we sought to create a map of key infrastructures in the UK where Law and the Humanities research was taking place.

At first glance, this seemed like a reasonably modest project. And yet the research undertaken by MAHP, in particular its considerable dataset, revealed a more complex and dynamic landscape than initially anticipated. Over time, the project evolved into an exercise in deep mapping, one with a detailed inward-looking (but not insular) gaze. It was curated with an awareness and openness to the variegation and fragmentation within the discipline. Indeed, we were eager to capture the quite radical interdisciplinarity that characterises part of contemporary Law and the Humanities scholarship.

A recurring issue, one intimately related to deep mapping, was the problem of depth. Like any research activity, it can be difficult to know how much detail is necessary and sufficient but not excessive. And maps, by their essence, must reduce complexity – scaling reality down to something more easily digested. If every detail of a landscape were represented on a map, it would necessarily be enormous – in fact, 1:1 in scale – and as a consequence, be wholly indigestible. Lefebvre, in a similar vein, observed, “how many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents? It is doubtful whether a finite number can ever be given in answer to this sort of question” (, 1991: 85).

Given this, our resource is best viewed as a “launchpad” – aware of its limitations and the limitations of any kind of map. Rather than attempting totalisation (Harvey, 1996: 4-5), it instead offers an informed starting point for further exploration. Combining an interactive national map with an innovative series of data visualisations, the project creates an atlas of a research landscape. It offers an opportunity for finding yourself and for getting lost. Furthermore, the data represented, unlike that on a printed map, is far from static. It will continue to grow or fall in number with input from those in the discipline itself and will improve in its specificity over time as greater detail – description and self-identification of research interests and activities – is added.

As to our other visualisations, these offer a range of creative windows into the discipline. At a glance, the word clouds show thematic areas of concentration in the field but also gaps – spaces where only limited scholarly work has yet been done. The two relationship visualisations, one concerning tags and the other infrastructures, are akin to network mapping. In a way that the traditional 2-D map perhaps never was, these are designed to be played with, pulled around, and enjoyed. So too “entanglement” is an experimental feature by which to filter results – both for “the Humanities” and for “Law” – to explore infrastructures which are more or less aligned under those umbrellas.

Taken together, these resources will permit academics, students, funders, and anyone else with an interest in law and the humanities, to better explore the research landscape. In turn, it is hoped that the map will allow scholars at various career stages to find opportunities for collaboration and community, including a search option to show only infrastructures that provide funding. Ultimately, there are as many ways to use these resources as can be imagined by users. We are always looking for feedback and suggestions on how to improve the map so that it meets the needs of the community moving forward.    

📍Are you on the map? Check here. |🗺️ Explore the map | Add your infrastructure |📥Get in touch → [email protected]

Bibliography

Blavatskyy, P. (2021). ‘Obesity of politicians and corruption in post-Soviet countries’. Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, 29(2), 343-56.

Börner, K. (2010). Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know. The MIT Press.

Foucault, M. (2002). Archaeology of Knowledge. Sheridan-Smith, A.M., trans. Routledge.

Harley, J. B. (2001). The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell.

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trs., Blackwell.

Monmonier, M. (2018) How to Lie with Maps. 3^rd edn., The University of Chicago Press.

Rankin, W. (2020). ‘How the Visual is Spatial: Contemporary Spatial History, neo-Marxism, and the Ghost of Braudel’. History & Theory, 59(3), 311-42.

Roberts, L. (2024). ‘Spatial Anthropology and Deep Mapping’ in Rossetto, T. and Presti, L. L. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities. Routledge.

Zerubavel, E. (1995). ‘The Rigid, the Fuzzy, and the Flexible: Notes on the Mental Sculpting of Academic Identity’. Social Research, 62(4), 1093-1106.