Session 2: Culture Mapping Principles
The fundamental goal of culture and culture and cultural mapping is to help communities recognize, celebrate and support diversity.
Cultural mapping principles are used to develop different visualisation techniques to display tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The principles of cultural mapping demonstrate the motives for cultural mapping, its uses, its users, different methodologies of mapping and the concept of data layering.
Culture mapping is a tool to illustrate cultural characteristics. For example:
- a sense of identity
- the elements that make a community unique
- languages
- beliefs
- technologies
Cultural Mapping encourages the generation of new material, such as different interpretations and viewpoints. The principles that underpin cultural mapping further demonstrate local and cultural resources and strategies that engage in accurate and sensitve analysis of people, places and environments.
| Tangibles | Intangibles |
| Galleries | Memories |
| Craft industries | Personal histories |
| Distinctive landmarks | Attitudes |
| local events | Values |
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Cognitive mapping - The internal spatial representation of environmental information
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Community/social mapping develops imaginative thinking and knowledge fusions maximizing the creative potential of a community
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Maps represent layers of information and are useful to understand and identify spatial links and explain concepts in a visual way
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Location - where things are. Maps are the tools needed to define distance
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Mind maps overcome complex problems, and organizes thoughts
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For more information on the principles of culture mapping, see the presentation delivered by Ms Elizabeth Marasco, GIS developer for the Regional Advisor for Culture in Asia and the Pacific.
