9 quotes
To make maps that work, we must depict categories using methods that match the structures of human mental categorization.
How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995)
Without categorization, maps would not be possible.
How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995)
Maps, due to their melding of scientific and artistic approaches, always involve complex interaction between the denotative and the connotative meanings of signs they contain.
How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995)
It may be that the human brain not only perceives but stores the essentials of a visual scene using the same geometrical, quasi-symbolic, minimalist vocabulary found in maps.
How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995)
Understanding how maps work and why maps work (or do not work) as representations in their own right and as prompts to further representations, and what it means for a map to work, are critical issues as we embark on a visual information age.
How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995)
The representational nature of maps, however, is often ignored – what we see when looking at a map is not the word, but an abstract representation that we find convenient to use in place of the world. When we build these abstract representations we are not revealing knowledge as much as are creating it.
How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995)
When visualization tools act as a catalyst to early visual thinking about a relatively unexplored problem, neither the semantics nor the pragmatics of map signs is a dominant factor. On the other hand, syntactics (or how the sign-vehicles, through variation in the visual variables used to construct them, relate logically to one another) are of critical importance.
How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995)
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.
How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995)
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).
How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995)