Reclaiming Place Through Marginalized Narratives: A Critical Geography and Humanistic Approach to the Cartographic Visualization of Beyoğlu, Istanbul

There exists an increasing need and trend to visualize a collective sense of place based on personal experiences and memories. This is especially common among counter-mapping, whereby the mapmakers, whether an individual or a group, appropriate traditional tools to highlight otherwise marginalized narratives. There are multiple challenges of visualizing experiences and memories with GIS technologies and using conventional cartographic techniques. Experiences and memories are often expressed as text and are rich in information. However, they rarely provide spatially precise and logically consistent spatial data suitable for GIS technologies. Using the ‘Beyoğlu – I will survive’ map as a case study and feminist visualization principles, I propose unconventional visualization techniques in this paper to address these challenges and present what is gained and lost when these techniques are used.