Paper short abstract:

Rivers are represented on maps not as encoded information but as absence - an interruption in the flow of information. The River Map, intent on giving the river course and its boundaries more presence, required a new set of drawing conventions and offered an alternative understanding of the river.

Paper long abstract:

Maps are the most commonly understood and actively used form of public drawing. The making of such drawings depends on the use of widely understood conventions, which may vary between cultures, but must be commonly held within a culture to enable their use as public representations. Yet, the underlying information encoded is derived from different sources in a variety of forms. The Boundary Remark Books carried by surveyors as they plotted the first Ordnance Survey served as source for the maps, yet, though codified, did not use the same conventions but rather a more specialized set familiar only to surveyors. Same information, different code.

Common to many cultures, the rivers illustrated on public maps are visible not by virtue of codification or symbol but by absence of such - present only because they act as an interruption to the information encoded regarding land-forms or buildings. From 2002 to 2012 a re-imaging of a river map was made, in which the presence of the river and its edge formation took precedence over all other features, which required the derivation of a new set of drawing conventions to visualize, with clarity and consistency, the nature of the river and its edge through its full tidal range. The map was an armature for the documentation of various forms of information - a form of boundary book or, in modern parlance, a file folder - holding all the disparate pieces together in a form of visual simultaneity.