roomthily

It turns out, then, that this is not just an internet problem. A textbook education in cartography will not teach you, in scientific terms, why a choropleth Mercator map is worse than a choropleth sinusoidal map or a proportional symbol map. Interpretation of area in quantitative maps gets no quantitative explanation; instead it gets basically the same treatment as propaganda maps and the whole Peters thing, which paraphrased boils down to “bigger things totally look more prominent and important because they’re bigger.” Semiology of Graphics is the only book I have that really addresses size directly and as matter of fact—noting among other things that “it is not possible to disregard it visually” and “in any map representing areas of unequal size, what is seen is [quantity] multiplied by the size of the area”—but even if he was correct, Bertin was pretty much making things up. Mentioned more commonly but no more deeply explained is the need to normalize data to account for area in choropleth maps, i.e., not mapping counts. Considering this rule, the projection requirement, and a host of “ideal” enumeration unit characteristics, choropleth mapping just starts to sound like a terrible idea for anything at all. Size variation that is not directly related to numerical variation seems to cause nothing but problems. Danny Dorling’s arguments for cartograms and mapping human phenomena in human space, not geographic space, start to sound appealing. Too bad cartograms are also kind of awful.

I don’t want Cartography to be reduced to mastery of pulling levers to make pretty things. Not because I fear for my career—I can pull levers with the best of them—but rather because it limits the gains in the quality of web mapping. You don’t need to have an advanced degree in Cartography or be an old-school Cartographer to make good maps, but you do need to take the time to understand the when and why of mapping techniques, not just the how.