Mappers

The trouble begins with the name. One rarely finds cases when the term cultural mapping has been successfully translated into other languages, and used instead of the English. In Bulgarian, nevertheless, каротграфиране на култури (carotgrafirane na culturi) occurs.

Over all, cultural mapping is used pretty often. In November 2007 Google produced nearly 200 000 hits. The concept, however, is not entirely Anglo-Saxon. As a start to the workshop, in her substantial review about the development of the genre, Milena pointed at the atlas culturels that have been cultivated in France for decades. She cited a number of reasons for the boosting of cultural mapping, largely connected to new technologies and globalisation, when areas to access have opened up and means to explore have developed. Besides empirical data collection the internet helped desk researchers to execute siginificant acts of cultural mapping.

The emerging phenomenon of networking created the need to screen the field for potential partners. A special kind of dynamic mapping was created whereby waving networks was followed by cultivating links by recurrent collection of information about the members of the network. This went hand in hand with the creation of internet portals. Mapping was catalysed by the need for partner seeking, fund raising and related interests. Including business interest, where mapping is a natural part of sales management: marketing culture requires a sort of cultural mapping.

Theoretical concept-making and established taxonomies are not able to keep pace with fast changes in the environment and the ways of culture, and thus cultural mapping, with its pioneer techniques often breaks ground.

Transition and regime change in eastern Europe represented a special stream of mapping. The transition from ideology driven cultural policies to evidence based ones required facts and information. Many of the exploratory projects of cultural mapping in the region were initiated and financed by outside change agents, such as the Council of Europe, European Cultural Foundation, the projects of George Soros, the British Council, the Pro Helvetia Fund and others. The latest wave was propelled by the British and focused on the cultural or creative industries.

So this was mapping cultural mapping, done by Milena, reconstructed with my own inserted thoughts generated by it. Mapping cultural mapping went on on the second floor of a Sofia apartment house, pinpointing a number of noteworthy cases:

The survey on the contribution of the creative (copyright based) sector to Bulgarian economy, co-ordinated by WIPO, the world intellectual property organisation. They found that 4,51% of the gross output of the country was due to this sector in 2005.

The mapping done by Interspace and cult.bg with Swiss help, a live information bank, partly based on voluntary provision of data along the questionnaires modelled on the LabforCulture, and aiming at forging a pool of cultural operators, promising a live network.

Another Swiss-backed project was the mapping of north-central Bulgaria in 2005, run by FabriC in Gabrovo, which has led to the establishment of a Regional Cultural Resource Centre. Besides producing this agency with a promising name, the project had the merit of surfing both conventional public organisations and independent operations.

The city of Plovdiv was scanned for creative industries with British help, starting from a list of 4800 businesses arriving at 107 scrutinised at length. Nevertheless a valid cross-section is gained about the sector that produced 3,63% of sales in 2004. 

Sharing information and views was accompanied by discussing the various categories of mapping that range from traditional large scale statistical surveys to focused action research projects. The workshop raised questions relating to benchmarking, the need for uniform or standard mapping tools. This led to the limits of generalisation and comparison. (How far is Plovdid a typical Bulgarian city - or is it really a special one?). The expenses of mapping was also discussed, and experiences about bringing costs down.

Those present at the workshop gave different, and in the major part not entirely heartening answers to the question whether the various authorities needed and used the findings of those bottom-up and (or) externally initiated cultural mapping exercises.

[1] Mapping initiatives in South East Europe: Objectives, methodologies, scale and possibilities. Sofia, Bulgaria; 17 November 2007. An ENCATC workshop held at the venue of AirSpace.