Digitizing Urban Maps as a form of Rhetorical Network

In Jeff Rice's 'Urban Mapping: A Rhetoric of the Network," he explores different urban mapping and how rhetoric can be used in these maps. Rice expresses the sentiment that rhetoric is something that helps us analyze texts and digital mapping better. Like I mentioned in my other blog post, these maps teach us about the rhetoric of ethos, credibility and authority, and logos, logic and reasoning. Rice believes that the rhetoric is physical spaces, as well as the possibilities of database driven acts. Rice says that exploring the spatial arrangement of database driven maps helps us explore things like who created the map which is important to consider in relation to ethos and credibility. Commerical cities may be prioritized over marginalized cities for the commercial purposes. This can affect us if certain things are prioritized over other, it can lead to problems within the accuracies of the map. I think that digitalizing paper maps can change the materiality of the map because some maps have a certain texture or layout while it is in its paper form, and if we digitalize that, it would change everything.

Rice, Jeff. Urban Mappings: A Rhetoric of the Network. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, 2008, pp. 198–218. Taylor & Francis, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773940801958438.