WhatisCartography_Transcript

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Jorge Santos

21/03/2021

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Cartography. MOOC

Section 1
What is Cartography?
Dr. Kenneth Field, Edie Punt & John Nelson

Dr. Kenneth Field: Hello and welcome to Cartography. This is the first of a series of short films
that accompany our MOOC on cartography. And to join me today is expert cartographer,
John Nelson, and even more expert cartographer, Edie Punt.
Edie Punt: Hi.
Ken: My name is Ken Field. We're going to just spend a few minutes today talking about
cartography, what it means, and what it means to be a smarter map maker, how we think
about making maps, and really try to encourage you to think about going beyond the
defaults. Maybe that's a good phrase to start off with. So, first off, let's define what
cartography is, I guess. John, do you want to give us what your definition is?
John Nelson: What is cartography? Cartography is the communication of a geographic
phenomenon, the visual communication, so the "o-graphy-of-cart." And it's this beautiful mix
of geography, which is already awesome, and art, which is already awesome. And then you
get awesome plus awesome and it's just cartography.
Ken: Beat that.
John: Beat awesome plus awesome.

Cartography. MOOC
Edie: Okay. It's really combining the idea of where things are and why they're there, so the
spatial component, with the art. And it's really about communication, so finding a way to
communicate those spatial phenomena in a way that resonates with people and better helps
them understand.
Ken: I kind of like to think about the word or the letters that make up the word, because, to
me, it encompasses a lot of different aspects. So we start off with the C, and that to me shouts
compromise, because everything about making a map is a compromise. You know, a
cartographer makes decisions all the time about what to put on the map, what to take off the
map. And there are a lot of compromises.
Edie: Well, you can't put the whole world on a piece of paper.
John: You can't put everything on the map.
Ken: That's true.
Edie: Yeah. Yeah.
Ken: That's why maps exist.
Edie: Compromise.
Ken: Secondly is this little word "art." You know, there is a component of artistry in making a
great-looking map. This isn't just about making maps look pretty, but it's the artistry of
communication. The next letter along is the O, and I think that stands for opportunity. So
making a map is an opportunity to tell your audience something interesting, to communicate
a story, to give people facts.
John: Or if you don't make a map at all. The worst map is one that never gets made.
Ken: We're going to skip a whole load of letters and mush them into one here. Talk about
graph. Graph, to me, is indicative of a mode of communication. So we go to school and we
get taught to read and write and we get taught to use numbers. We very rarely get taught to
communicate using graphs or graphics. There is a graphical language, a syntax, an alphabet
even. That's what this MOOC is really all about, getting us to think about communicating in a

Cartography. MOOC
graphical way, what works well, what perhaps doesn't work so well. So we might call that
graphicacy.
John: Graphicacy.
Edie: Oh, like literacy, but graphicacy.
Ken: Yeah, and that's not my term. This is a 1958 term.
John: Is that how it's pronounced?
Ken: You can pronounce it how you like. We're bringing it back. We're going to learn to be
graphicate. Yeah?
Edie: Okay, graphicate.
Ken: Okay. And then this final letter, just hanging out on the end here, the Y, to me, whenever
you make a map, you ask yourself why. Why am I choosing this particular set of symbols? Why
have I processed my data in a particular way? And I think that's always important to keep that
in mind is to ask yourself a lot of questions about why you're doing things in a certain way.
Edie: Every bit of ink or screen pixel you put on there has to have a reason.
Ken: Yeah.
Edie: Otherwise it's just noise.
John: I think the why is a super powerful component of cartography.
Ken: Yeah, and that's what we're going to try to encourage everyone to do by taking this
MOOC is to think about the whys of making a map and to learn to sort of not just accept
software defaults, but go a little bit beyond them and think about working with them in order
to create your beautifully artistic, graphicate map.
Ken: So why do you make a map?

Cartography. MOOC
John: I make a map because I have to. I love it. Making maps is so much fun. But really, I
make a map because often a piece of data looks pretty interesting to me and I think that
there's something inside it.
Edie: So you start with a dataset typically.
John: I do.
Edie: Okay.
John: And the inverse of that is sometimes I'll have a technique I want to try out, and the data
itself is kind of a second hand. You know, maybe I want to try a different kind of coastline
effect. I don't necessarily always start with the data. I think a lot of cartographers work that
way. You might want to try something interesting, and the data itself is just supporting that. –
Edie: Sometimes you just need to explain the reality of a where. So maybe it's an article that
lists a lot of different places and movement of goods or ideas or people, and that entire
concept, that whole story is so much easier for somebody to understand if they can see it in a
map.
Ken: So once we move past the purpose, you know, you've got your purpose for the map,
then we kind of get into a process.
Edie: Okay.
Ken: So what's your process of map making?
Edie: I think a lot depends on what kind of map you're making. Who are you making it for?
Are you making a map that's going to be on a piece of paper and, you know, hung on a
telephone pole? Well, that's going to be a different process ...
Ken: Right.
Edie: ... than you're going to make a web map that's going to go out to, you know, hundreds,
thousands of people.

Cartography. MOOC
John: That's a good point. Know your audience. Know why you're making the map.
Edie: Yeah.
Ken: Right.
John: Ask yourself why you're making the map.
Ken: For me, I like to think of the process as an iterative one.
Edie: Definitely.
Ken: Because you never have a linear process of starting to make the map and then da, da,
da, da, finish.
Edie: Yeah.
Ken: It doesn't work like that. Quite often you find things out as you go along and you change
things or ...
John: And it's hard to know when you're done.
Ken: Sure.
John: Like any creative process, you always want to tweak something. And if you see it later,
you think, "I wish I could have done something differently."
Edie: Or you're Ken and you think it's done. And Edie walks by your office and says, "Ken no."
Ken: Yeah, "I didn't like that. Change it."
Edie: Yeah.
Ken: I also think there may be, you know, there's an element to truth in 90% of the map takes
10% of the time ...
Edie: Yeah.

Cartography. MOOC
Ken: ... and then, you know, the final 10% takes maybe another 90% of the time. So you do
have to work out when you're done with the map. So maybe that's a good place to talk a little
bit about some of the constraints on map making, because this doesn't just exist in a
beautiful, open, "I can do what I like" kind of environment.
Edie: Right.
John: If you pay for the band, you name the tune, right? So if you're making a map for
someone, you have to take their input. You have to know what their purpose is and what their
objectives are. And you're sort of stuck with whatever data you're working with,because it's
been handed to you and you have a task and you have a deadline.
Edie: Well, and then there's the classic cartography constraint of you can pick your scale, you
can pick your extent of geography, and you can pick your size of the output, but you can only
have two of those three things. Right? You can't have all three.
Ken: Right. But you can overcome that with multi-scale web mapping.
Edie: Right.
Ken: But then you may have got other constraints, like technology.
Edie: Yeah, exactly.
Ken: And also, it's a good idea to keep the user in mind. Who's going to be looking at your
map? Are you going to be making a map for children? Are you making it for school kids? Are
you making it for foreign language tourists? These are all issues that you need to think about.
Edie: Right. Somebody has color vision impairment.
Ken: Right. I like to think about the old adage of form and function. You know, the form of
your map should support the function that you're trying to communicate.
John: And certainly sometimes there's an inherent theme in the data that can have an
influence on what design sensibility you bring to the map.
Ken: I mean, you can go too far.

Cartography. MOOC
Edie: Yeah. You don't ...
John: Like an over-the-top pirate map with flaming skulls.
Edie: Well, if you're mapping something that's a really serious topic, you don't want to have a
goofy, light-hearted font, for example.
Ken: That's right. Exactly, like Comic Sans.
Edie: Like Comic Sans.
Ken: So going back to this idea of graphicacy, you thought we were done, didn't you?
Edie: Yeah, graphicacy.
Ken: I think a nice way of making a map is to structure the way you lay out the graphics to
communicate. So if you think about the written word perhaps in a book, for instance, or in the
spoken word, we're linking letters into words, into paragraphs, sentences. And hopefully,
we're being reasonably intelligible. People are following what we're saying. Everything is
coming at you in serial, one word after the ... we're trained to think about ...
Edie: Yeah, it’s a train of thought. Yeah, train of thought.
Ken: ... decoding language in that way. But with maps, you look at any of those on the wall
behind, it's everything is one go, right?
Edie: Yeah, it's all at once.
Ken: So our brain is struggling to try to disentangle all of that, and thinking about trying to
structure that message is important. It's a constraint.
Edie: I think you can use the tools that are pretty well-known in graphic design to bring out
what's the first message, what's the most important thing that you want somebody to see first,
and use those graphical tools, the graphicacy. Make sure that the primary message comes
out first. John: One strategy is you can make a series of maps, and each series of maps
introduces some kind of walking into a phenomenon.

Cartography. MOOC
Ken: Right.
Edie: Right.
John: Start with a broad view of something and taking a closer look.
Edie: But even there, they're going to have a lot in common to sort of ground your reader.
John: Absolutely. There will be a family of maps.
Edie: So they are oriented to what's changing about the message on each map.
Ken: I kind of like looking at old maps.
John: I love it.
Ken: Because they give you hints about what works really well, what perhaps doesn't work. So
let's go back. Let's look at Erwin Raisz's Atlas of Global Geography 1944.
John: Classic. Beautiful.
Edie: He makes gorgeous maps.
Ken: I find the use of symbology and pictorial components and icons and color really
magnificent. When you think about some of the constraints on the technology at the time,
you know, printing 1944.
Edie: Yeah.
John: I appreciate his hand. It's before these tools that automated a lot of the process.
Ken: Right.
John: Right. He's forming these largely from scratch and airbrushing and painting and
stenciling. It's just profound how much effort was involved back then. And when you have a
craft that involves so much effort from front to back, then I think you're more invested in
something instead of just kind of cranking through it in a digital process.

Cartography. MOOC
Edie: Right. The thing that he was so masterful at is depicting landforms, and I think that is
where he really nails the aesthetics in his maps. As artistic as they are, they're incredibly
accurate too. He's not just putting mountain ranges here because they fit in. I mean, that's
actually where the mountains are and what they look like. I mean, he nails it.
Ken: Yeah. What I quite like, of course, an atlas isn't just about topography and the natural
world.
Edie: Right.
Ken: He uses some really revolutionary, innovative statistical charting.
Edie: Right.
Ken: You know, it's sort of almost 3D prism maps.
Edie: Yeah.
John: And amazing cutaways.
Ken: Yeah. And again, doing this by hand.
John: The profiles of his landforms.
Ken: You know, working out what angles to actually show of this map that's going to work. I
think, more than anything, what this atlas teaches me is the amount of time it must have taken
to think through all of this work.
Edie: Yeah.
Ken: And that to me is maybe a difficulty with modern cartography, this compression of time.
You can make a map in 10 seconds now, whereas maybe it took him 2 weeks to do the same
thing or even longer.
Edie: Right. Right.
Ken: And that's why we're trying to encourage this thinking about cartography and going
back to some of these classics. We're going to now talk about some great cartographers.

Cartography. MOOC
We're going to call them map people. I'm going to throw out a name and let's get a reaction.
Tom Patterson?
John: [singing] Tom.
Edie: Tom, yeah. Tom is somebody who I don't think has ever done anything or come up with
an idea that he hasn't openly shared with everyone.
Ken: So Tom works in the National Parks Service in the U.S. And anybody who's been to a
national park will have used one of products, one of his maps. They are works of art.
John: Art, absolutely.
Ken: But he's kind of got a side job of, like you said, just doing stuff ...
Edie: Yeah.
Ken: ... websites and various resources. And really, the whole point about talking about these
map people is go and check out their work.
Edie: Yeah.
Ken: Go have a look at what Tom has been doing over his career. Check out his websites and
get some inspiration.
John: Something that I'm especially impressed with about Tom is he's got these two worlds,
right, this very artistic sensibility and then a technical mastery.
Edie: Yeah.
John: So the mathematics involved in projections is, of course, intimidating to somebody like
me. But he has his own projection, right?
Edie: Yeah.
Ken: Yeah.

Cartography. MOOC
John: And he's got that over there. And meanwhile, he's doing these amazing shaded relief
works of art. That's all the same human being rolled up into one Tom Patterson package.
Edie: Yeah.
Ken: Well, is it?
John: Maybe.
Ken: I mean, maybe there's more than one. Nobody knows. Anyway, check out Tom's work.
It's great. A lot of the times we make our maps using computers now, but it hasn't always
been that way. And I thought it might be fun to have a look at some of the oldy worldly tools
of the trade.
Edie: Yeah.
Ken: It's got a ring to it.
John: I like it.
Ken: I'm just going to pick up my little magic box here. Ooh.
Edie: What have you got, Ken?
Ken: How about that?
Edie: Looks familiar, Ken.
Ken: Mr. Nelson, what is it?
John: It looks unfamiliar.Ken. I don't know what this is. I don't know what a person would use this for.
Ken: Okay. Edie?
Edie: Well, Ken, as you know, this belongs to me.
Ken: As you know, yeah.

Cartography. MOOC
Edie: Yeah, this is my toy. So this is a scriber, and this is actually a special type of scriber. It's a
swivel scriber. As you notice, parts of it swivel.
John: I can see it swivel.
Edie: There's even a little pin in here where you can set it to not swivel.
John: Is this a line drawer, like an analog line drawer ...
Edie: Yes.
John: ... and you can swap out pen tips or scrape tips?
Edie: But those ... you're right. It's scrapes. We used to make maps in reverse.
John: I couldn't have.
Edie: So we'd have something called scribe coat.
John: Okay.
Edie: You'd scrape off with this exactly where you wanted the light to come through, which
would be where the ink would be.
Ken: Try and make your maps in reverse and see how you do.
Edie: Yeah. So this one swivels.
John: When was the last time you used this?
Edie: In school.
John: 2009?
Edie: No.
John: 2008
Ken: That's probably a good point at which to stop. This is the tool of the week.

Cartography. MOOC
Edie: Scriber.
Ken: On to cartofails. That's my term. I think I made it up. I may have stolen it from
somewhere. But a lot of things get me a bit angsty about maps. You know, when I see things
on them, and they're like argh. One of my pet peeves is hyperbole. You know, it's the
exaggerated statement on a map. This map shows something wonderful and fantastic. Or
even, "Here are 10 maps that are going to change the way you think about life, the universe
and everything." It's just like let's keep our maps a little bit more respectful and perhaps a
little less shouty.
Edie: I don't need to know that your map is a map. And I don't need to know that the legend
on a map is a legend.
John: You don't label your legend as such? What if somebody doesn't know?
Edie: If you make the legend ... too much. Too much.
Ken: What about "I love maps"? We all love maps, right? Yeah, that's why we get into
cartography.
John: This is a cartofail?
Ken: Well, it's a cartofail for some.
Edie: I would say it's not a cartofail. I think it's a pet peeve. I hear a lot of people say, "I've
always loved maps." And the thing is ...
John: This isn't a cartofail. This is a carto good.
Edie: Here's the thing. It is good. It is good, but ...
John: It's a carto success.
Edie: It is. Yeah, it's an overly obvious statement.
John: Oh, okay. Okay, you've convinced me.
Edie: Yeah.

Cartography. MOOC
John: Not that I needed convincing.
Ken: So you no longer love maps, right?
John: This is ...
Ken: This is an awkward moment.
John: I need to go take a nap.
Ken: Well, let's finish off with death by push pin, red dot fever. It's this tendency ...
John: Yeah, measles maps is what they're called.
Ken: Yeah, it's this tendency of just I've got data. I've got two trillion points.
John: I've got chicken pox.
Ken: It's all got to go on my map. It's all got to go.
Edie: Yeah.
John: Where is it all?
Ken: And that, to me, just says that the person making the map didn't think about what they
could leave off, you know.
Edie: Yeah.
Ken: It's just like, "I've got all this data. I'm going to ..."
John: Or they could aggregate it in some way.
Ken: You could do a lot of stuff. We are learning a lot of techniques in the exercises on the
MOOC about how to process this data. Does your map have a title that doesn't make sense?
Does it have a lot of red dots on it? Does it say, "I love maps"? So with that, I'd like to offer you
both a biscuit.
Edie: Thanks, Ken.

Cartography. MOOC
John: Yeah, thank you, Ken.
Edie: Okay. Oh, one of each, okay.
Ken: Lovely.
Edie: Thanks.
Ken: Cheers.

WhatisCartography_Transcript

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