Ed Parsons dislikes cartographers, “more than anyone in the world”

The title was one of the opening statements made by Google’s “technology evangelist” Ed Parsons in a recent talk for the British Computer Society. In the talk he argues traditional street maps are bad (all of them) because they fail to engender a sense of place and because they abstract the world using map symbols. He goes on to say Streetview is good and doesn’t suffer any of these problems. So is Google Earth. The take-home message is that 2D is bad! Maps symbols are bad! Photos are good! And paper is bad! [subtext: Google doesn’t make paper, but if we did, we might soften our stance].

Here is my concern: I’m not aware of any research to support such simplistic claims. Merely saying them, repeatedly, doesn’t make them true. The wayfinding research that I have seen shows that for some users, for some map reading tasks, yes, absolutely Streetview and Virtual Earths and geo-tagged photos can help. And for some users and some situations paper is better than pixels. And for some users, and some kinds of data, 2D is better than 3D. But none of those statements is a blanket truth and by outright rejecting all traditional maps in his talk–even if just for wayfinding on mobile devices–an otherwise solid argument is overshadowed by hyperbole.

If drug companies made arguments like these they might try to convince us by saying “Aspirin is bad. Aspirin may make your arms fall off. But our new drug has none of these problems. Use our new drug.” The difference is drug companies are legally obligated to back-up their claims. It is perhaps the reason they don’t employ “evangelists.”

The deeper, more troubling message that we hear again and again is that cartography is little more than making street maps.  And the flip side of that coin is the only reason we use maps is for wayfinding. Streetview is very cool (it really is), but it is also pretty specialized in its uses and the advent of it does not in fact “kill cartography.”

Cartography is more than taking photographs of a street. It’s a shame that someone with this level of influence at Google has such a limited view of why we map.

Map Evolution 2

Over the summer, pilule a friend asked me to put together a map of Punta Gorda, a small coastal town in the country of Belize. He works for Hillside Health Care International, adiposity a non-profit organization providing medical care in that area. The map was needed to help orient and guide volunteer health care professionals visiting from the States while serving at the clinic. It was to be printed in color on a letter-sized page.

In talking with my friend, I knew right away that the biggest obstacle was going to be getting good local data for the map (and getting it for free, because there was no money set aside for the project). Most importantly, I needed data for local roads (locations and names) and point features (hotels, government buildings, grocery stores, banks, etc.), these being the two main pieces he wanted clinic volunteers to have at their disposal.

Of the big free mapping services, Google Maps had the most complete road network for the town, so it served as my starting point. I had hoped there might be a nice Open Street Map shapefile to work from, but this area is still mostly a blank slate:

View of Punta Gorda in Open Street Map

So, I decided the simplest and easiest approach to getting those roads on the map would be to trace them in Adobe Illustrator. That’s where the remainder of the map design work was planned, and there was no good reason to construct a spatial database or harness the powers of GIS for our purposes, let alone the time and money to do so. We knew this would limit what what could be done with the map in the future, but a simple map illustration existing wholly outside of a GIS served our immediate purposes on the cheap.

The point features were collected in the field by my friend, who personally biked the streets of Punta Gorda and used his local knowledge and that of others who live there to collect and verify the names and locations of streets and places. His work was all done by hand by annotating an early draft of the map. While he was collecting data, I finished the layout and styling. Then, with his annotations overlaid on my working version, I placed markers at each point of interest (red and blue shapes and National Park Service-style symbols), added labels, and created the index that sits in the lower right-hand corner of the map.

Throughout the production process I captured screen shots showing the evolution of the map. When it was finished I sequenced them together to form a simple movie, as I did for the evolution of a map of downtown Madison, WI. Each screen represents about 10-15 minutes of real production work. While this PDF shows the final state of the map, the Punta Gorda movie (see it bigger here) shows how I got there. As you’ll see, it generally involved the transformation of a satellite image into a map by way of a healthy dose of cartographic abstraction and symbolization.