Impossible Maps : The Power of Labels

3 minute read

This post is my short response to the following readings.

“Sorry, We Have No Imagery Here”, Meg Van Huygen
The first chapter of James Scott’s Seeing Like A State (pages 11- 52).

When I saw the satelite images (censored, hidden, blurred) from Meg Van Huygen’s article, I was immediately reminded of the Korean Demelitarized Zone between North and South Korea. It’s a buffer zone that stretches about 160 miles long and is about 2.5 miles wide. This special area remained untouched by humans after the Korean War that lasted from 1950-1953, but unlike its name “Demiltarized Zone”, the area is full of landmines and civilian access highly restricted. Here is a link to the wikipedia article if you want to learn more.

Because of the area’s sensitivity in terms of military, political and diplomatic significance, it is near impossible to find a detailed map of the DMZ. Especially in Korean maps powered by local tech companies like Kakao and Naver, the area is represented with plain gray-ish layer that only displays the very minimum road information. Google Maps also doesn’t do a good job of representing this area. I would guess the South Korean government has asked many map vendors to remove this area from their maps. I find this interestin because one can easily get more detailed information from Google Earth (if you bother to actually zoom into the area and look for deatils).

I decided to make my own map of this area, since I spent 2 years serving in the ROK Army under United Nations Command Security Battalion - JSA prior to coming to Olin for college education. You can find my version of the map here. I used geojson.io to indicate some interesting areas and routes. Then I used Mapbox GL JS and its Compare plugin to put an ordinary map and a satelite map next to each other. Here is a short legend for the map (which I couldn’t figure out how to display with Mapbox GL JS)

The red area indicates the general DMZ area (full of landmines),

The white area indicates the Joint Security Area (JSA, a.k.a the Truce Village of Panmunjom) and the NNSC camp

The pink area indicates the Kaesong Industrial Complex,

The green area indicates Dae-Sung-Dong and its North Korean counterpart Ki-Jong Dong.

The blue area indicates Camp Bonifas where both the South Korean and the US forces are stationed at.

The dark red area indicates Guard Post (OP) Ouellette

The green route was a jogging route for everyday morning exercises (it eventually leads to North Korea)

In the process, I learned that labels have so much power in that they embue meanings, intentions, and stories to a seemingly banal representation of the world. Abstraction as mentioned in Seeing Like a State is achieved through how we choose to display entities in our representation. I found it very intersting that just adding some color polygons and lines on the map shifted my perception completely, from looking at a map of random roads to looking at a map of danger and alert. In some sense, being able to label things on a map indicates an ownership of special knowledge which I think directly corrsponds to one’s ownership of power. I was also surprised by the fact that I was able to find Wikipedia articels for most of the regions I labled). Thus we can infer that once a person has labels on a map then it become so much easier to access the detailed information about the area on the map.

I became curious of how other people have labled the area. So I did some google search and found several relevant sources. Each map is unique in that the labels indicate different perspectives. Please enjoy these maps of mine and others!