What is a quadrangle?

A quadrangle is a map from the United States Geographical Survey that is a single rectangular unit from a survey of as if a grid was laid out across the entire continental United States. This singular quadrangle map is based upon the grid created by longitude and latitudinal lines, and thus the area within a singular quadrangle can be anywhere from 49 to 70 square miles. Each quadrangle is named after a substantial geographic feature or remarkable site. This quadrangle is named after the first and most prominent European settled town within the space, New Market.

This website page on the New Market quadrangle is a deep map of this place, exploring various historical aspects and experiences through the tools of ArcGIS and archival research. The goal of these pages are to introduce its viewers to the history of this contained landscape, seeing how the topography and geological features may have shaped how humans have come to interact with the land. This webpage will present three deep maps, all of which hope to reframe history visually and contextually. Each of the maps focus around a singular theme of exploring how movement occurs with the land; the three subjects are human patterns of movement, economic and monetary movement, and finally individual and vehicle movement through the land.

I’d also like to provide some context for my own subjectivities, so that you may better understand what may have shaped my choices and goals for this map. I am a female undergraduate college student whose primary academic focus lies in history and theater. While preparing for this deep map, I was heavily influenced by my own background interests in theatrical and performance theory. I was particularly drawn in texts to the concepts of place vs. space, and learning how to create a map which documents the experience of a place itself. These concepts presented in digital humanities articles (see general reference guide under sources), were often akin to the theories discussing the theatrical “affect.” Affect in theater is the concept that art is not an object, but a space, a dimension, in which one might experience an affect, aka a transfer of material and emotional being. Repeatedly I felt like these articles were arguing the need for deep maps to become a space, like art, where an affect can be transferred. I hope that this context for my own generalized perception of deep mapping may help you interpret my subjectivity, that you may understand the information presented is not merely factual, but also distorted first through my own perceptions of the world.

The interactive map seen below is a first look at the New Market quadrangle in relation to the surrounding geography, counties and indigenous territories. To see the Native territories, languages and treaties overlay, zoom farther out to around the size of the state of Minnesota.