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Caitlin Swisher
April 6, 2012
Honors Comp II
Chandler, OK
Lakes of Chandler
As you can see from these Google map images, I am from a teeny-tiny town
called Chandler. These maps really intrigue me because in my town, we don’t use
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these street names. We have our own names for everything, and if you can’t find
what you’re looking for from our names, you’re out of luck!
I used two map images for this project, but I am not comparing the two
images. The top image is of my entire town. You can see everything except for the
lakes, which are north of town. The bottom image is zoomed in on the two lakes.
You can see my housing complex in this image, and the Chandler Municipal Golf
Course.
The two lakes in Chandler are officially named “Chandler Lake” and “Bell Cow
Lake”. I have lived there all my life and never knew this. To me and the other
residents of Chandler, the lakes are referred to as “Old Lake” and “New Lake”,
respectively.
On the left hand side of the top image, you can see labels for “Oak Park
Cemetery” and “Clearview Cemetery”. These are the only two cemeteries in
Chandler, and I’m not proud of our names for them. Chandler is a very old town; it
was established before Oklahoma actually became a state. Therefore, for a part of
its history, Chandler was strictly segregated. To this day, the cemeteries are
segregated. “Oak Park” we refer to as “white” and “Clearview” we refer to as “black”.
There is no rule or law that white citizens can’t be buried in the black cemetery or
vice versa, that’s just the way things are still done. You’re buried where your family
is buried, and your family is either in the “black” cemetery or the “white.”
On the right side of the same image, you can see where our McDonald’s is
found. Just to the right of this is Atwoods. I have always known the road in front of
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Atwoods to be “Wal-Mart Road” because the building Atwoods occupies used to be a
Wal-Mart (what the people of Chandler lack in imagination they make up for in
common sense). This map taught me that I’m actually looking at 1st Street.
Similarly, there is one street in Chandler where almost all of our shops are located.
Our pharmacy, restaurants, movie rental store, hair places, and lawyer’s office are
all conveniently bundled onto this little strip. We call this “Main Street”, but it is
actually “Manvel Avenue”. Who would have thought? I wonder who this Manvel
was.
I cannot identify the person who authored this map. I don’t believe it was all
computerized, because someone had to go in and decide which places where worthy
of being labeled, and which were not. In other words, someone had to generalize
the content. We learned about this practiced in Chapter 3 of “How to Lie with
Maps”. It states “content generalization promotes clarity of purpose or meaning by
filtering out details irrelevant to the map’s function or theme” (Monmonier 35). If
we go off of the labels this author provides us, it is conveying my town as a place
with a lot of dead people, little value for education, and home of two fast food
restaurants.
Unfortunately, the two measly fast food restaurants are true. All we can
boast of is a Sonic and a McDonald’s. While I have no proof, I’m fairly certain that
Chandler has a relatively similar number of dead people as other towns its size.
Maybe the cemeteries are included because they take up a large land mass area. Just
to the right of Oak Park Cemetery is our junior high and high schools, however, and
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they were not included. If I was making this map, and I was worried about the two
labels overlapping because of their close proximity to each other, I would have
chosen to label the schools, along with their neighboring sport complexes, instead of
the cemeteries. There are not very many reasons to come visit Chandler, but we do
get a lot of relatives coming in for graduations, sporting events, plays, and other
school functions. It would just make more sense to make the school easier to find on
the map. It can be concluded then, that the map was not made to cater towards
families or in order to make children’s activities easy to find. Going off of this, I say
that the intended audience of this map is people looking for the Route 66
Interpretive Center. It’s our large, historic landmark/museum. We get a lot of
bikers and other tourists coming in to see this, and it’s featured on this map. If this
is really the case, the purpose of this map is to provide only the historic landmarks
of Chandler. The ones I could find on the map are the Route 66 Interpretive Center,
Indian Springs Park, and the two cemeteries (they actually are historic just for being
segregated).
This map originally caught my attention just for having different names for
places than what I was used to. The world isn’t impressed with our little names for
our little landmarks, streets, and buildings. They want to know the real, official,
clean-cut names. But as I paid more attention to these official labels, I became
aware of what labels were left off, and what was chosen to be labeled. At first I was
alarmed that places that were so important to me, such as the golf course, the
schools, and the sporting complexes were not included on the map. But after
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further deliberation, I see that the labels they did include were placed to appeal and
attract tourists, bringing business to my small town.
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Caitlin Swisher
April 6, 2012
Honors Comp II
Works Cited
Monmonier, Mark. "Chapter 3-Content." How to Lie with Maps. Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago, 1996. 35. Print.
Chandler, OK, Screenshot, Google Maps. Personal photograph by author. 2012.
Lakes of Chandler, Screenshot, Google Maps. Personal photograph by author. 2012.