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Cartography has been pivotal in making visible the number of people who die in the context of migration. In this article, the author explores the potential of mapping to study and develop another dimension of the geography of death within exile: the more intimate dimensions of post-mortem geographies as experienced by those who survive a loved one. Inspired by Avril Maddrell’s call for developing new cartographic representations to share difficult emotions and memories associated with death, the author mobilized two alternative mapping practices—inductive visualization and sensibility mapping—to chart the emotional and intimate geographies embedded in the stories of two migrants who lost a close friend with whom they lived while in exile. The mapping process that led the author to represent these intimate post-mortem geographies brought me to reflect on the importance of developing alternative cartographic forms of expression that focus on the experiential and the emotional, rather than on the factual and the measurable. By steering this cartographic shift away from the fact of death as the end of a journey to death as a lingering event in the life of those who survive, the author proposes a cartography of grief and mourning that aims to contribute to individual and collective remembering.

O seguinte artigo propõe o uso da Cartografia e da Arte no estudo e na representação de histórias de vida. Apesar de as histórias de vida, como metodologia, caracterizarem-se por proporcionar uma aproximação da subjetividade e do ponto de vista dos informantes, elas ainda não se consolidaram dentro da Geografia. Alguns autores mencionam que a concepção de espaço e de território como elementos objetivos, materiais e mensuráveis dificultou sua implementação dentro dos estudos espaciais. Nesse sentido, este trabalho sugere que o nexo entre Arte, Cartografia e as histórias de vida pode ajudar na representação da subjetividade e das experiências de distintos informantes e grupos sociais. Para ilustrar essa proposta metodológica, primeiro é discutido o uso das histórias de vida dentro das Ciências Sociais e da Geografia; em seguida, são revisados os distintos vínculos entre Arte e Cartografia; por último, são analisadas as histórias de vida de seis estudantes mexicanos de pós-graduação, para poder representar de maneira cartográfica e artística os resultados encontrados.

Stories are now broadly recognized as important sources of geographic information in different domains of the spatial humanities. The methodologies mobilized to identify these spatial data, however, remain the subject of intense debate. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by focusing on what we can learn from the close reading of stories to improve the quality of distant reading approaches. We do this through an in-depth comparative analysis of how toponyms are used across 10 oral life stories of exiles. Results show that a "distant listening" of the number of country names mentioned in these stories provides an accurate representation of their global geographies. However, the finer-scaled geographies of these stories become highly distorted when counting more local toponyms such as neighbourhoods, cities or regions. This study also reveals that results could be improved by accounting for the distribution and repetition of toponyms throughout these stories. Such insights and their nuances are described in this paper with an aim to help narrow the gap between close and distant reading methodologies.

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