♪ [music] ♪ - [Ken] Hello and
welcome to Cartography. This is the first of a
series of short films that accompany our
MOOC on cartography. And to join me today is
expert cartographer, John Nelson, and even more
expert cartographer, Edie Punt. - [Edie] Hi.
- [Ken] My name is Ken Field. We're going to just spend
a few minutes today talking about cartography, what it means,
and what it means to be a smarter map maker, how we think about
making maps, and really try to encourage you to think about
going beyond the defaults. Maybe that's a good
phrase to start off with. So, first off, let's define
what cartography is, I guess. John, do you want to give
us what your definition is? - [John] What is cartography?
Cartography is the communication of a geographic phenomenon,
the visual communication, so the "o-graphy-of-cart." And it's this beautiful
mix of geography, which is already awesome,
and art, which is already awesome. And then you get awesome plus
awesome and it's just cartography. - [Ken] Beat that.
- [John] Beat awesome plus awesome. - [Edie] Okay. It's really combining
the idea of where things are and why they're there, so the
spatial component, with the art. And it's really
about communication, so finding a way to communicate
those spatial phenomena in a way that resonates with people
and better helps them understand. - [Ken] I kind of like to think about the
word or the letters that make up the word, because, to me, it encompasses
a lot of different aspects. So we start off with the C,
and that to me shouts compromise, because everything about
making a map is a compromise. You know, a cartographer
makes decisions all the time about what to put on the map,
what to take off the map. And there are
a lot of compromises. - [Edie] Well, you can't put the
whole world on a piece of paper. - [John] You can't put
everything on the map. - [Ken] That's true.
- [Edie] Yeah. Yeah. - [Ken] That's why maps exist.
- [Edie] Compromise. - [Ken] Secondly is
this little word "art." You know, there is a component of
artistry in making a great-looking map. This isn't just about
making maps look pretty, but it's the artistry
of communication. The next letter along is the O,
and I think that stands for opportunity. So making a map is an
opportunity to tell your audience something interesting, to communicate
a story, to give people facts. - [John] Or if you
don't make a map at all. The worst map is
one that never gets made. - [Ken] We're going to skip a whole load
of letters and mush them into one here. Talk about graph.
Graph, to me, is indicative of a mode
of communication. So we go to school and we
get taught to read and write and we get taught
to use numbers. We very rarely get taught to
communicate using graphs or graphics. There is a graphical language,
a syntax, an alphabet even. That's what this MOOC
is really all about, getting us to think about
communicating in a graphical way, what works well, what
perhaps doesn't work so well. So we might call that graphicacy.
- [John] Graphicacy. - [Edie] Oh,
like literacy, but graphicacy. - [Ken] Yeah, and that's not my term.
This is a 1958 term. - [John] Is that
how it's pronounced? - [Ken] You can
pronounce it how you like. We're bringing it back.
We're going to learn to be graphicate. Yeah?
- [Edie] Okay, graphicate. - [Ken] Okay. And then this final letter,
just hanging out on the end here, the Y, to me, whenever you make
a map, you ask yourself why. Why am I choosing this
particular set of symbols? Why have I processed
my data in a particular way? And I think that's always important
to keep that in mind is to ask yourself a lot of questions about why
you're doing things in a certain way. - [Edie] Every bit of ink or screen pixel
you put on there has to have a reason. - [Ken] Yeah.
- [Edie] Otherwise it's just noise. - [John] I think the why is a super
powerful component of cartography. - [Ken] Yeah, and that's what we're going
to try to encourage everyone to do by taking this MOOC is to think
about the whys of making a map and to learn to sort of not
just accept software defaults, but go a little bit beyond them
and think about working with them in order to create your
beautifully artistic, graphicate map. ♪ [music] ♪ - [Ken] So why
do you make a map? - [John] I make a map
because I have to. I love it.
Making maps is so much fun. But really, I make a map because often
a piece of data looks pretty interesting to me and I think that
there's something inside it. - [Edie] So you start
with a dataset typically. - [John] I do.
- [Edie] Okay. - [John] And the inverse of that is
sometimes I'll have a technique I want to try out, and the data
itself is kind of a second hand. You know, maybe I want to try a
different kind of coastline effect. I don't necessarily
always start with the data. I think a lot of
cartographers work that way. You might want
to try something interesting, and the data itself
is just supporting that. - [Edie] Sometimes you just need
to explain the reality of a where. So maybe it's an article that lists a
lot of different places and movement of goods or ideas or people, and that
entire concept, that whole story is so much easier for somebody to
understand if they can see it in a map. - [Ken] So once we move past the
purpose, you know, you've got your purpose for the map, then
we kind of get into a process. - [Edie] Okay.
- [Ken] So what's your process of map making?
- [Edie] I think a lot depends on what kind of map you're making.
Who are you making it for? Are you making a map that's
going to be on a piece of paper and, you know,
hung on a telephone pole? Well, that's going
to be a different process ... - [Ken] Right.
- [Edie] ... than you're going to make a web map that's
going to go out to, you know, hundreds,
thousands of people. - [John] That's a good point.
Know your audience. Know why you're
making the map. - [Edie] Yeah.
- [Ken] Right. - [John] Ask yourself why
you're making the map. - [Ken] For me, I like to think
of the process as an iterative one. - [Edie] Definitely.
- [Ken] Because you never have a linear process of
starting to make the map and then da, da,
da, da, finish. - [Edie] Yeah.
- [Ken] It doesn't work like that. Quite often you find things out as you
go along and you change things or ... - [John] And it's hard
to know when you're done. - [Ken] Sure.
- [John] Like any creative process, you always want
to tweak something. And if you see
it later, you think, "I wish I could have done
something differently." - [Edie] Or you're Ken
and you think it's done. And Edie walks by your
office and says, "Ken no." - [Ken] Yeah,
"I didn't like that. Change it."
- [Edie] Yeah. - [Ken] I also think there may be,
you know, there's an element to truth in 90% of the map
takes 10% of the time ... - [Edie] Yeah.
- [Ken] ... and then, you know, the final 10% takes maybe
another 90% of the time. So you do have to work out
when you're done with the map. So maybe that's a good place to talk a
little bit about some of the constraints on map making, because this
doesn't just exist in a beautiful, open, "I can do what I like"
kind of environment. - [Edie] Right.
- [John] If you pay for the band, you name the tune, right? So if you're making a map for
someone, you have to take their input. You have to know what their purpose
is and what their objectives are. And you're sort of stuck with
whatever data you're working with, because it's been handed to you and you
have a task and you have a deadline. - [Edie] Well, and then there's the
classic cartography constraint of you can pick your scale, you can
pick your extent of geography, and you can pick
your size of the output, but you can only have
two of those three things. Right?
You can't have all three. - [Ken] Right. But you can overcome
that with multi-scale web mapping. - [Edie] Right.
- [Ken] But then you may have got other constraints, like technology.
- [Edie] Yeah, exactly. - [Ken] And also, it's a good
idea to keep the user in mind. Who's going to be looking at your map?
Are you going to be making a map for children?
Are you making it for school kids? Are you making it for
foreign language tourists? These are all issues
that you need to think about. - [Edie] Right. Somebody
has color vision impairment. - [Ken] Right. I like to think about
the old adage of form and function. You know, the form of your
map should support the function that you're trying
to communicate. - [John] And certainly sometimes there's
an inherent theme in the data that can have an influence on what design
sensibility you bring to the map. - [Ken] I mean, you can go too far.
- [Edie] Yeah. You don't ... - [John] Like an over-the-top
pirate map with flaming skulls. - [Edie] Well, if you're mapping
something that's a really serious topic, you don't want to have a goofy,
light-hearted font, for example. - [Ken] That's right.
Exactly, like Comic Sans. - [Edie] Like Comic Sans. - [Ken] So going back
to this idea of graphicacy, you thought we
were done, didn't you?. - [Edie] Yeah, graphicacy.
- [Ken] I think a nice way of making a map is to structure the way
you lay out the graphics to communicate. So if you think about the
written word perhaps in a book, for instance,
or in the spoken word, we're linking letters into words,
into paragraphs, sentences. And hopefully, we're
being reasonably intelligible. People are following
what we're saying. Everything is coming at you
in serial, one word after the ... we're trained
to think about ... - [Edie] Yeah, its a train of thought.
Yeah, train of thought. - [Ken] ... decoding
language in that way. But with maps, you look at
any of those on the wall behind, it's everything is one go, right?
- [Edie] Yeah, it's all at once. - [Ken] So our brain is struggling
to try to disentangle all of that, and thinking about
trying to structure that message is important.
It's a constraint. - [Edie] I think you can use the
tools that are pretty well-known in graphic design to bring
out what's the first message, what's the most important thing
that you want somebody to see first, and use those graphical
tools, the graphicacy. Make sure that the primary
message comes out first. - [John] One strategy is you can make
a series of maps, and each series of maps introduces some kind
of walking into a phenomenon. - [Ken] Right.
- [Edie] Right. - [John] Start with a broad view of
something and taking a closer look. - [Edie] But even there,
they're going to have a lot in common to sort
of ground your reader. - [John] Absolutely.
There will be a family of maps. - [Edie] So they are oriented to what's
changing about the message on each map. ♪ [music] ♪ - [Ken] I kind of like
looking at old maps. - [John] I love it.
- [Ken] Because they give you hints about what works really well,
what perhaps doesn't work. So let's go back.
Let's look at Erwin Raisz's <i>Atlas of
Global Geography</i> 1944. - [John] Classic. Beautiful.
- [Edie] He makes gorgeous maps. - [Ken] I find the use of symbology
and pictorial components and icons and color really magnificent.
When you think about some of the constraints on the
technology at the time, you know, printing 1944.
- [Edie] Yeah. - [John] I appreciate his hand.
It's before these tools that automated a lot of the process.
- [Ken] Right. - [John] Right. He's forming
these largely from scratch and airbrushing
and painting and stenciling. It's just profound how much
effort was involved back then. And when you have a craft that involves
so much effort from front to back, then I think you're more invested
in something instead of just kind of cranking through
it in a digital process. - [Edie] Right. The thing that he was
so masterful at is depicting landforms, and I think that is where he really
nails the aesthetics in his maps. As artistic as they are,
they're incredibly accurate too. He's not just putting mountain
ranges here because they fit in. I mean, that's actually where the
mountains are and what they look like. I mean, he nails it.
[Ken] Yeah. What I quite like, of course,
an atlas isn't just about topography and the natural world.
- [Edie] Right. - [Ken] He uses
some really revolutionary, innovative statistical charting.
- [Edie] Right. - [Ken] You know, it's
sort of almost 3D prism maps. - [Edie] Yeah.
- [John] And amazing cutaways. - [Ken] Yeah. And again,
doing this by hand. - [John] The profiles
of his landforms. - [Ken] You know, working out
what angles to actually show of this map
that's going to work. I think, more than anything, what this
atlas teaches me is the amount of time it must have taken
to think through all of this work. - [Edie] Yeah.
- [Ken] And that to me is maybe a difficulty with modern
cartography, this compression of time. You can make
a map in 10 seconds now, whereas maybe it took him 2 weeks
to do the same thing or even longer. - [Edie] Right. Right.
- [Ken] And that's why we're trying to encourage this
thinking about cartography and going back to
some of these classics. ♪ [music] ♪ We're going to now talk about
some great cartographers. We're going to
call them map people. I'm going to throw out a
name and let's get a reaction. Tom Patterson?
- [John] [singing] Tom. - [Edie] Tom, yeah.
Tom is somebody who I don't think has ever done anything
or come up with an idea that he hasn't openly
shared with everyone. - [Ken] So Tom works in the
National Parks Service in the U.S. And anybody who's been to
a national park will have used one of products,
one of his maps. They are works of art.
- [John] Art, absolutely. - [Ken] But he's kind of got
a side job of, like you said, just doing stuff ...
- [Edie] Yeah. - [Ken] ... websites
and various resources. And really, the whole point about
talking about these map people is go and check out their work.
- [Edie] Yeah. - [Ken] Go have a look at what
Tom has been doing over his career. Check out his websites
and get some inspiration. - [John] Something that I'm especially
impressed with about Tom is he's got these two worlds, right, this
very artistic sensibility and then a technical mastery.
- [Edie] Yeah. - [John] So the mathematics
involved in projections is, of course, intimidating to somebody like me.
But he has his own projection, right? - [Edie] Yeah.
- [Ken] Yeah. - [John] And he's got that over there.
And meanwhile, he's doing these amazing shaded relief works of art.
That's all the same human being rolled up into one
Tom Patterson package. - [Edie] Yeah.
- [Ken] Well, is it? - [John] Maybe. - [Ken] I mean, maybe there's
more than one. Nobody knows. Anyway, check out Tom's work.
It's great. ♪ [music] ♪ - [Ken] A lot of the times we make
our maps using computers now, but it hasn't always been that way.
And I thought it might be fun to have a look at some of the oldy
worldly tools of the trade. - [Edie] Yeah.
- [Ken] It's got a ring to it. - [John] I like it.
- [Ken] I'm just going to pick up my little magic box here. Ooh.
- [Edie] What have you got, Ken? - [Ken] How about that?
- [Edie] Looks familiar, Ken. - [Ken] Mr. Nelson,
what is it? - [John] It looks unfamiliar, Ken.
I don't know what this is. I don't know what a
person would use this for. - [Ken] Okay. Edie? - [Edie] Well, Ken, as
you know, this belongs to me. - [Ken] As you know, yeah.
- [Edie] Yeah, this is my toy. So this is a scriber, and this is
actually a special type of scriber. It's a swivel scriber.
As you notice, parts of it swivel. - [John] I can see it swivel. - [Edie] There's even a little pin in here
where you can set it to not swivel. - [John] Is this a line drawer,
like an analog line drawer ... - [Edie] Yes.
- [John] ... and you can swap out pen tips or scrape tips? - [Edie] But those ...
you're right. It's scrapes. We used to make maps in reverse.
- [John] I couldn't have. - [Edie] So we'd have
something called scribe coat. - [John] Okay.
- [Edie] You'd scrape off with this exactly where you wanted
the light to come through, which would be
where the ink would be. - [Ken] Try and make your maps
in reverse and see how you do. - [Edie] Yeah.
So this one swivels. - [John] When was the
last time you used this? - [Edie] In school.
- [John] 2009? - [Edie] No.
- [John] 2008. - [Ken] That's probably a
good point at which to stop. This is the tool of the week.
- [Edie] Scriber. ♪ [music] ♪ - [Ken] On to cartofails.
That's my term. I think I made it up.
I may have stolen it from somewhere. But a lot of things get me
a bit angsty about maps. You know, when I see things
on them, and they're like argh. One of my
pet peeves is hyperbole. You know, it's the exaggerated
statement on a map. This map shows something
wonderful and fantastic. Or even, "Here are 10 maps
that are going to change the way you think about life,
the universe and everything." It's just like let's keep
our maps a little bit more respectful and perhaps
a little less shouty. - [Edie] I don't need to know
that your map is a map. And I don't need to know that
the legend on a map is a legend. - [John] You don't label
your legend as such? What if somebody
doesn't know? - [Edie] If you make the
legend ... too much. Too much. - [Ken] What about "I love maps"?
We all love maps, right? Yeah, that's why
we get into cartography. - [John] This is a cartofail?
- [Ken] Well, it's a cartofail for some. - [Edie] I would say it's not a cartofail.
I think it's a pet peeve. I hear a lot of people say,
"I've always loved maps." And the thing is ... - [John] This isn't a cartofail.
This is a carto good. - [Edie] Here's the thing.
It is good. It is good, but ...
- [John] It's a carto success. - [Edie] It is. Yeah, it's
an overly obvious statement. - [John] Oh, okay.
Okay, you've convinced me. - [Edie] Yeah.
- [John] Not that I needed convincing. - [Ken] So you no
longer love maps, right? - [John] This is ...
- [Ken] This is an awkward moment. - [John] I need
to go take a nap. - [Ken] Well, let's finish
off with death by push pin, red dot fever.
It's this tendency ... - [John] Yeah, measles
maps is what they're called. - [Ken] Yeah, it's this
tendency of just I've got data. I've got two trillion points.
- [John] I've got chicken pox. - [Ken] It's all got to go on my map.
It's all got to go. - [Edie] Yeah.
- [John] Where is it all? - [Ken] And that, to me, just says
that the person making the map didn't think about what
they could leave off, you know. - [Edie] Yeah.
- [Ken] It's just like, "I've got all this data.
I'm going to ..." - [John] Or they could
aggregate it in some way. - [Ken] You could do a lot of stuff.
We are learning a lot of techniques in the exercises on the MOOC
about how to process this data. Does your map have a title
that doesn't make sense? Does it have
a lot of red dots on it? Does it say,
"I love maps"? So with that, I'd like to
offer you both a biscuit. - [Edie] Thanks, Ken.
- [John] Yeah, thank you, Ken. - [Edie] Okay.
Oh, one of each, okay. - [Ken] Lovely.
- [Edie] Thanks. - [Ken] Cheers. ♪ [music] ♪
