Alan MacEachren - Cartography Quotes

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Geovisualization integrates approaches from visualization in scientific computing (ViSC), cartography, image analysis, information visualization, exploratory data analysis (EDA), and geographic information systems (GISystems) to provide theory, methods, and tools for visual exploration, analysis, synthesis, and presentation of geospatial data (any data having geospatial referencing).

Alan MacEachren
Two developments of the past four decades played crucial roles in establishing a research agenda for the study of map symbolization and design. The first was Arthur H. Robinson's dissertation (published as The Look of Maps in 1952), with its call for objective research, and the second was the adoption in the 1970s of a paradigm of cartography as communication science.

Alan MacEachren
Exploring maps as representation forges important links between cartography and a variety of cognate fields concerned with this topic in its various facets (including geographical information systems [GIs] and remote sensing, as well as art, cognitive science, sociology, cognitive and environmental psychology, semiotics, and even the history and philosophy of science).

Alan MacEachren
Cartography as a discipline has a significant stake in the evolving role of maps within systems for scientific visualization, within spatial decision support systems, within hypermedia information access systems, and within virtual reality environments.

Alan MacEachren
Cartography is about representation. This statement may seem obvious, but it has been overlooked in our search for organizing principles for the field. Rather than restricting research in cartography to maps that present well-defined messages (and suggesting a single, map-engineering approach to improving the transmission of these messages, as the communication approach did), attention to maps as spatial representation expands the field.

Alan MacEachren
Treating cartography as a formal communication system implies that we can improve map communication if we can reduce the filtering or loss of information at various points in the system where in the system should have a positive effect, and an information loss should be impossible to overcome. Most efforts to study cartographic communication have been directed to the middle stages in the system: the cartographer's transformation of selected information into the map and the initial extraction of information from the map by the user.

Alan MacEachren