Visual Communication and the Map: How Maps as Visual Objects Convey Meaning in Specific Contexts

This article reports the results of a case study of two maps, produced by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and their involvement in a federal court case over the deployment of the Navy's low-frequency active sonar. Borrowing from Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) approach to visual analysis, Turnbull's (1989) understanding of the map, and Latour's (1990) understanding of how visuals work in social contexts, the article offers an analytical approach to studying maps as powerful visual, rhetorical objects.