Savage Mapmaker Destroys Tiny Towns in Rural US South

• Different cultural and social views of the world = different maps

• Ojibwa maps, Nazi maps...

Monmonier: the "paradox" of cartography: to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies"

• map projections, map generalization...

• maps are not objective reflections of a simple reality; they are human created objects imbued with human intent. Not mirrors or photographs of the world, but selective and carefully crafted arguments about some aspect of the world.

First step in understanding maps: how do we come to know the environment around us?

• the mental interpretation of the world

• precedes the process of making a map

Environmental knowledge NOT acquired in a passive manner

• Map of Delaware OH

Knowing the environment: a simplified process (series of steps)

• sensory data >> abstraction and categories >> symbols and representation

1a. Sensory Data

Use of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch all provide us with sensory data

Sound: "Sound is vibrations propagating through a medium such as air. The detection of these vibrations is a mechanical sense akin to a sense of touch. In humans, this perception is executed by tiny hair fibres in the inner ear which detect the motion of a membrane which vibrates in response to changes in the pressure exerted by atmospheric particles within a range of 20 to 22000 Hz, with substantial variation between individuals." (source)

Using soundscapes: Boat Captains off the Coast of Canada:

"They used to get their position by echo whistling. They'd give a short whistle and estimate the distance from the shoreline by the returning echo. If the echo came back from both sides at the same time they'd know that they were in the middle of the channel. They could recognize different shorelines by the different echoes - a rocky cliff, for example, would give a clear distinctive echo, whereas a sandy beach would give a more prolonged echo. They could even pick up an echo from logs. Nowadays, if the radar (or GPS) breaks down, they have to put out an anchor. Their ears aren't trained to listen their way through the fog." (Schaefer)

Mapping Soundscapes in Vancouver BC, Canada

Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada) soundscape "regions"

Neighborhood Nuisance

Sound Effects Vol. 7: Neighborhood Nuisance

Mapping Soundscapes around the Columbus OH Airport

Mapping Noise and Noise Abatement Zones

Smell: smell-scape: "Smell is a "chemical" sense (like taste). Unlike taste, there are hundreds of olfactory receptors, each binding to a particular molecular feature. Odor molecules possess a variety of features and thus excite specific receptors more or less strongly. This combination of excitatory signals from different receptors makes up what we perceive as the molecule's smell." (source)

• smells not randomly distributed

• some noses are more sensitive to the smellscape...
  

• humans do notice the smellscape on occasion
  

• particularly when their apartment buildings (at Penn State)...
  

  
  

  are across the street from the sewage treatment plant

  

• Ohio Wesleyan's Smellscape:
  

• Columbus's Smellscape (from Columbus Dispatch):
  

  
  
  

  Smell Maps (Google)

  
  
  

  Mapping the World's Cities by Smell

Touch: "Touch, also called tactition, mechanoreception or somatic sensation, is the sense of pressure perception, generally in the skin. There are a variety of nerve endings that respond to variations in pressure (e.g., firm, brushing, and sustained). (source)

• braile maps: example

• Snuggly Haptic Maps

• Haptic Maps (Google)

• Touching the environment? What do places feel like?

Taste "Taste or gustation is a chemical sense. There are at least four types of tastes that "buds" (receptors) on the tongue detect. The four well-known receptors detect sweet, salt, sour, and bitter." (source)

• Edible Maps: "Last year we presented a conceptual framework for cartographic symbolization that included variables for all the human senses. This year we are exploring the production of maps using variations in olfactory and gustatory stimuli as well as the more developed visual, factual, and aural variables. In this poster we present both qualitative and quantitative choropleth maps, with separate maps targeting each of the five senses. We invite participants to help us evaluate our experimental mapping techniques by viewing, touching, listening to, smelling, or tasting each map. We will ask participants to identify different classes on one set of maps and different quantities on a second set. Participant responses will be analyzed for consistency among responses and distinction among classes as well as the ability to estimate ordinal and perhaps ratio level differences in magnitude. We hope that this evaluation of our exploratory map creation methods gives us insight into multisensory mapping that in the future may be conducted in a computer controlled virtual reality environment." (source)

• Tasting the environment? What do places taste like?

• Geophagy

• Soil Tasting

• Place Taste and the Taste of Place

Even more senses: Balance/acceleration, temperature, kinesthetics (sense of the relative position of body parts), pain...

Vision: "Sight or vision is the ability of the brain and eye to detect electromagnetic waves within the visible range (light) interpreting the image as sight." (source)

Maps are usually about vision - stuff in the environment we can see (on maps we can see), or invisible stuff mapped so it can be visible.

Tuan: "Blindness makes a geographical career virtually impossible, whereas it presents no insurmountable barrier to wisdom" (Sight and Pictures)

• but there is much we do not see: visible energy vs entire spectrum

• and we don't function using raw sensory data alone

1b. Abstraction and Categories

Humans have the ability to think abstractly

• abstract: Having conceptual rather than concrete existence

Categories: a unit or a subunit of a larger whole made up of members sharing one or more characteristics

• what goes into a category can vary from person to person and culture to culture

Common categories of human and environmental phenomena on maps:

• examples)

Categories simplify our environment so we can understand it easily

• a contradiction?

• we understand better and faster by simplifying and categorizing the world, and how we simplify and categorize varies from person to person and culture to culture

• maps are an important means of simplifying and categorizing things so we can understand them

1c. Symbols and Representation

Communication: We cannot always point to something when we want to communicate about it, so we need something to stand for these objects: symbols

Symbol: A thing representing something else because of relationship, association, convention, or resemblance.

• Symbols are at the basis of natural languages (eg., English), math, statistics, pictorial communication (such as drawings, maps, graphs)

Symbols for human and environmental phenomena on maps:

• examples)

Visual Abstraction Gradient: the Visual Forms

• least abstract: photo to map to graph

• more abstract: words to numbers

Natural languages, maps, numbers, and words complement each other

Maps, as visual representations, and their symbols, are important as a means of enhancing and speeding up our understanding of the environment around us

• symbols: represent categories (house, road, river) on a map

• the map represents the physical or human environment

• think of them as means of environmental thinking and understanding and communication

2. Visualizing the Human and Physical Environment

Dorling: "...maps are not independent of the view of the observer: maps are context-dependent, often available only to the initiated, unlikely to be value-free and should be viewed with caution (although not necessarily scepticism). The role of the human being in interpreting and rendering world views in map form is central." (p. 4)

Monmonier: "The purpose of this book is to promote a healthy skepticism about maps, not to foster either cynicism or deliberate dishonesty. In showing how to lie with maps, I want to make readers aware that maps, like speeches and paintings, are authored collections of information and also are subject to distortions arising from ignorance, greed, ideological blindness, or malice." (p. 2).

Krygier & Wood: "Different goals lead to different maps! Frequently the quality of a map is a matter of perspective, not design. This is because a map is a statement locating facts, and people tend to select the facts that make their case. That's what the map is for: to make their case."

The way we envision or visualize the environment takes two general forms

1. intangible maps: representations of spatial relations in our head:

• Psycho-Geographic & Mental Maps

2. tangible maps: representations of spatial relations on paper or computer screens:

• Cartographic Maps

We will spend the majority of this class discussing cartographic maps, but will start out with an introduction to mental maps

Next lecture: Psycho-Geographic & Mental Maps

• Engage in a Psycho-Geographic mapping exercise (Exercise 1)

E-mail: jbkrygier@owu.edu

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