Geographers From The United States

"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."

"Use of the term visualization in the cartographic literature can be traced back at least four decades (Philbrick, 1953). It was the 1987 publication of a report by the U. S. National Science Foundation, however, that established a new meaning for this term in the context of scientific research (McCormick et al., 1987). The report, produced by a committee containing no cartographers, emphasized the role of computer display technology in prompting mental visualization - and subsequent insight. Scientific visualization has, thus, been defined as the use of sophisticated computing technology to create visual displays, the goal of which is to facilitate thinking and problem solving. Emphasis is not on storing knowledge but on knowledge construction."

"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)."

"Maps have been a successful form of representation for centuries by making the world understandable through systematic abstraction that retains the iconicity of space depicting space. Advances in methods and technologies are blurring the lines among maps and other forms of visual representation and pushing the bounds of “map” as a concept toward both more realistic and more abstract depiction. As a result, there are a variety of unanswered questions about the attributes and implications of “maps.”"

"Many pressing problems facing science and society are inherently geospatial – location matters. The availability of essential geospatial data has increased dramatically over the past decade. Both scientific progress and application of geospatial information to societal needs remains hampered, however, due to the lack of methods for transforming these data into information and for combining information from diverse sources to construct knowledge. Progress requires fundamental breakthroughs in both geovisualization and its integration with other methods for geospatial knowledge construction. The research agenda delineated in this issue is a step toward achieving these breakthroughs. Identifying the challenges is the easy part. Meeting them is unlikely without a commitment to a coordinated approach, by both individuals and organizations in multiple countries."

"There are few results of man's activities that so closely parallel man's interests and intellectual capabilities as the map."

"The author took the only course in cartography available to him in 1937; it must have been fairly typical of the few being offered in America: lectures based largely on personal experiences were supplemented by a relatively few assigned readings, and by Deetz and Adam’s Elements of Map Projection. No textbook was used because there was none in English."

"I started with a kind of artistic approach... I visualized the best-looking shapes and sizes. I worked with the variables until it got to the point where, if I changed one of them, it didn't get any better... [only then I] figure out the mathematical formula to produce that effect."

"Take an orange and draw something on it -- say, a human face. Now carefully remove the peel, trying to keep it in one piece, and flatten it against your kitchen table. You'll see that in making a two-dimensional object out of a round one, something has to give. Either the face gets distorted and looks all 'mushed out,' or in flattening the peel, it breaks into segments, dividing the face as well into several parts. A cartographer chooses between a series of those kind of lesser-of-two-evils alternatives."

"Happiest day of my life, was when the Defense Department took down its Mercator... I started learning how to make maps while on an Army payroll. So getting to see mine in the Pentagon, flanked by generals, is a little like being a prophet who is finally honored by his hometown."

"I decided there ought to be another way of balancing out the various distortions without doing it mathematically."

"While doing illustrative work for Roderick Peattie, from him I learned the value of the unorthodox."

"Our experience in the Cartographic Section of the [OSS Map] Division clearly showed that the creation of a special purpose map was frequently as much a problem in design as it was a problem in substantive compilation."

"The development of design principles based on objective visual tests, experience, and logic; the pursuit of research in the physiological and psychological effects of color; and investigations in perceptibility and readability in typography are being carried on in other fields... such a movement in cartography cannot fail to materialize"

"If we then make the obvious assumption that the content of a map is appropriate to its purpose, there yet remains the equally significant evaluation of the visual methods employed to convey that content."

"The assumption that effective cartographic technique and its evaluation is based in part on some subjective artistic or aesthetic sense on the part of the cartographer and map reader is somewhat disconcerting. For example, E. Raisz claims that the “effective use of lines or colors requires artistic judgment,” and J.K. Wright explains that the suitability of a symbol “depends on the map maker's taste and sense of harmony.” Throughout the literature there are numerous similar assertions regarding the assumed subjective aesthetic and artistic content of cartography."

"There is also a considerable tendency to define the subject as a kind of meeting place of science and art. This is exemplified by Eckert. He pleads for artistic imagination and intuition in cartographic portrayal and claims that the inter-action of such talents with scientific geography produces the aesthetic map. There is no question about the importance of imagination and new ideas, but it is equally important that significant processes be objectively investigated, whether it be the visual consumption of a graphic technique or a process in geomorphology. It can perhaps best be approached by a comparison of the aims, techniques involved, and the results accomplished by each activity"

"Most scientific cartography is concerned with the dissemination of spatial knowledge."

"Until such time as logic and objective research concerning the relative efficiency of the various possibilities is undertaken, the cartographer can but rely on the experience and direction of the artist."

"Maps enable man to rise, so to speak, above his immediate range of vision, and contemplate the salient features of larger areas."

"Today most maps are printed by lithography."

"The design process involves a series of operations. In map design, it is convenient to break this sequence into three stages. In the first stage, you draw heavily on imagination and creativity. You think of various graphic possibilities, consider alternative ways..."

"Good design looks right. It is simple (clear and uncomplicated). Good design is also elegant, and does not look contrived. A map should be aesthetically pleasing, thought provoking, and communicative"

"In an important sense, all cartography is an art in that it is representational and that operation always involves some degree of abstraction. Geographical reality is infinitely complex and its complete depiction is quite impossible; elements must be left out and intricacies modified as a consequence of the fundamental requirement of information reduction. All maps, therefore, are abstractions and the decisions involved in the process are artistic in the sense that many of them must be made subjectively by the cartographer."

"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... Robinson (1952) pointed out some limits to approaching map symbolization and design from a purely artistic viewpoint, as he suggested was the guiding perspective at the time. Maps, like buildings that are designed primarily for artistic impact, are often not functional... Robinson (1952) argued that treating maps as art can lead to "arbitrary and capricious" decisions. He saw only two alternatives: either standardize everything so that no confusion can result about the meaning of symbols, or study and analyze characteristics of perception as they apply to maps so that symbolization and design decisions can be based on "objective" rules... Robinson's dissertation, then, signaled the beginning of a more objective approach to map symbolization and design based on testing the effectiveness of alternatives, an approach that followed the positivist model of physical science. In his dissertation, Robinson cited several aspects of cartographic method for which he felt more objective guidelines were required (e.g., lettering, color, and map design). He also suggested that this objective look at cartographic methods should begin by considering the limitations of human perception. One goal he proposed was identification of the "least practical differences" in map symbols (e.g., the smallest difference in lettering size that would be noticeable to most readers)."

"In a career of teaching, writing and research, Dr. Robinson always found time, as mapmakers have for centuries, to look for the best possible solution to cartography's frustrating "Greenland problem." On maps drawn according to the most familiar projection, devised by Gerardus Mercator in the 16th century, Greenland appears to be about the size of South America, though it is actually no larger than Mexico. The distortion is a result of the compromises inherent in representing a sphere on a flat piece of paper. If the shapes of land masses are correct, the sizes will be distorted, and vice versa. If lower latitudes are close to reality on maps, then the polar regions will be grossly misshaped. In 1963, Dr. Robinson devised his own map projection..."

"Problems connected with political boundaries have frequently elicited the interest of geographers. In all countries with chronic or acute boundary problems the geographers are drawn into the general discussion, more or less as experts, and in some cases the professional geographer has actually been called upon to assist in the determination and demarcation of boundaries."

"Geographers and agricultural economists have become increasingly interested in recent years in studying the associations of crops and livestock in different types of agriculture, in contrast to the separate consideration of individual crops or products."

"The border position of geography between the natural and the social sciences is fairly generally recognized. Concerned primarily with differences in the different areas of the world, geography studies both natural and cultural features. In some universities, it is included among the natural sciences, in other among the social scientists. In England and America, geographers have particularly cultivated that portion of their field which leads naturally into economics, i.e. ."

"Of all territorial settlements made at the end of the World War none has been so frequently criticized as that which we call the ."

"The core study of geography is the study of places, that is the analysis of the significant differences that distinguish the various areas of the world from each other. Among the differences that are significant to this areal differentiation, one of the more obvious are differences in landforms; one of the least obvious to the eye, but nonetheless important in molding the character of areas, are the differences in their political organization. In pursuing these and other separate topics, geographers "radiate out in diverse directions" "and for various distances, toward the cores of other disciplines." As long as they realise where they are in reference to the central core, they may hope to understand each other purposes."

"The primary problem of [is] the analysis of the degree to which the diverse regions of the state constitute a unity."

"Numerous geographers writing in recent years concerning the nature and scope of their subject have described the relation of their field to other fields of science in terms of a concept said to stem from Immanuel Kant and from Alexander von Humboldt. Whatever may be the original source of the concept, its importance in the current geographic thought stems from the writing of , the German master of the methodology of geography."

"Geographers are wont to boast of their subject as a very old one, extending, even as an organized science, far back to antiquity. But often when geographers in this country discuss the nature of their subject, whether in symposia or in published articles, one has the impression that geography was founded by a group of American scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century."

"Geography is not an infant subject, born out of the womb of American geology a few decades ago, which each new generation of American students may change around at will."

"Although the roots of geography, as a field of study, reach back to Classical Antiquity... its establishment as a modern science was essentially the work of the century from 1750 to 1850. The second half of this period, the time of Humboldt and Ritter, is commonly spoken of as the "classical period" of geography."

"Science is... in the broadest sense of organized, objective knowledge."

"To be sure, the moment the study passes beyond bare description the student must leave the landscape itself, must go beneath it, even to state what its form represents — to translate the outer foliage of a forest into the forest, the outer surface of buildings into different kinds of buildings, etc.... Our interest in houses, factories, and forests cannot be confined to their surface form; only in the limited field of aesthetic geography could such a restriction be justified. Our very use of such words as house, barn, factory, office building, etc., indicates that we are primarily concerned with the internal functions within these structures, the external form is a secondary aspect which we use simply as a handy means to detect the internal function - and should use only insofar as it is a reliable means for that purpose."

"Landscape - the external surface of the earth beneath the atmosphere... is merely an outward manifestation of most of the factors at work in the area."

"So important, indeed, is the use of maps in geographic work, that, without wishing to propose any new law, it seems fair to suggest to the geographer a ready rule of thumb to test the geographic quality of any study he is making: if his problem cannot be studied fundamentally by maps - usually by a comparison of several maps - then it is questionable whether or not it is within the field of geography."

"The unique purpose of geography is to seek comprehension of the variable character of areas in terms of all the interrelated features which together form that variable character."

"Geography is concerned to provide accurate, orderly, and rational description and interpretation of the variable character of the earth surface."

"We may once again modify our statement of the purpose of geography to read: the study that seeks to provide scientific description of the earth as the world of man."

"Richard Hartshorne (1899-1992) [is] an American geographer who perhaps more than any other geographer is associated with the regionalist perspective. Not that Hartshorne was the first to conceive of regionalism, but he systematically codified it, and provided an intellectually rigorous justification. In so doing he gave economic geography a critical role."

"A special target of examination ought to be how societies differ in making room for pauses in the midst of life, for it is during such pauses that individuals are able to appraise the meaning of what they have undergone."

"The word routine suggests the humdrum and the inconsequential; however, unlike the routines of workplace and office, those of home are not inconsequential for they're dictated by the cyclical requirements of biological life."

"Freedom implies space; it means having the power and enough room in which to act."

"The world feels spacious and friendly when it accommodates our desires, and cramped when it frustrates them."

"We think of the house as home and place, but enchanted images of the past are evoked not so much by the entire building, which can only be seen, as by its components and furnishings, which can be touched and smelled as well: the attic and the cellar, the fireplace and the bay window, the hidden corners, a stool, a gilded mirror, a chipped shelf."

"Experience takes time and calls for patience."