This
time last month I was highlighting the upcoming start of the World Cup and
wondering aloud if England
could win it – well, we all know the answer to that question now! It was a
very disappointing campaign, given the promise that all of the younger players
seemed to suggest. Unfortunately we didn’t play to potential and the
‘blistering pace’ that was supposed to be our secret weapon against ageing
opposition just wasn’t apparent. The same can’t be said of maps of the World
Cup, they have been all over the place. Given away in umpteen magazines and
newspapers, they now adorn offices and bedrooms around the country or have they
all been torn down in frustration?!
BCS
Symposium 2014
I
am writing this just over a week after the Symposium closed and I have had time to
reflect a little on this year’s event. We thought that with our 50th
Birthday last year, the numbers attending would be at their peak, but they were
exceeded by those attending this year. Some of that was due to the fact that we
held a joint event with the International Map Industry Association (IMIA) who
swelled our numbers and gave us more of an international dimension. But even
allowing for this the number of delegates was up, with over 100 people
attending the Wednesday sessions.
The
Mapathon on Tuesday went extremely well. Six teams were presented with data
from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and given about 6 hours to come up
with a map based on that data. I was invited along to help judge the teams’
entries and was impressed by what they had been able to achieve in such a short
time. They all took a different approach to representing the dataset and the
final outputs all looked at different strands of the information. We hope to
make them available via the BCS website soon, so keep monitoring it on a
regular basis.
The
programme had been constructed to try and reflect the broad nature of our
membership, drawing on speakers from a good range of organisations. Although we
had one or two late withdrawals it didn’t adversely affect the programme thanks
to those who were able to step in at short notice to plug the gaps. One gap we
couldn’t plug was the loss of our guest speaker on Tuesday evening. World
events got in the way and our speaker from the Army Co-operation Squadron was
deployed just days before the event at too short notice to be replaced.
This
is not the place to go through a synopsis of the talks and there will be a full
article in the next edition of Maplines that will do that. Suffice to say that
the range of presentations was excellent, the workshops were thought provoking
and instructive, with everything running very smoothly throughout the
Symposium. The Gala Dinner was very well attended, with 89 diners and it
was particularly pleasing that all but one of those recognised in the BCS
Awards process was present to collect their certificate or trophy.
Congratulations this year to all who received recognition from BCS for their
cartographic excellence and especially to Lovell Johns Ltd who won the overall
BCS Award. The Awards Display showcased the work that is going on around the
world with entries from as far afield as USA, New Zealand,
Mexico, Hungary and Ireland as well as from
the UK.
The BCS Awards for 2015 are open, so please do think about entering your
products for these as we celebrate excellence in Cartography.
The
Symposium programme alternates between accommodating the Helen Wallis Memorial
Lecture and the BCS President’s Address. This year it was the latter. I took
the opportunity to highlight the fact that despite several articles to the contrary,
Cartography is not dead – drawing an analogy from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and
more specifically the BBC Series Sherlock. At the end of Series 2 we were all
lead to believe that Sherlock was dead, but Series 3 showed him to be very much
alive. The same can be said of Cartography; commentators have tried to kill it
off, but it is in as healthy a position now as it ever has been.
The
problem we face is that the proliferation of tools and apps for creating maps,
specifically in the web medium, means that anyone can now make a map. Whilst
this is hugely positive in raising the profile and making people far more aware
of maps and their power, it also has the downside of there being a high proportion
of bad maps being created. As a cartographic community we can inwardly cringe
when we see some particularly bad cartography, but what can we do about it? I
firmly believe that we should not set ourselves up as the ‘Carto Police’ and
simply be critical of the bad. In the vast majority of cases it may not do any
actual harm as it is merely poor portrayal, clearly failing to get the message
across. But occasionally it will mislead, misinform or deliberately contort
data and it is this sort of bad cartography that I think we should be reacting
to. Whether it is as a result of laziness or lack of knowledge we should fulfil
a role of highlighting maps that do their job well and offering advice to those
that totally miss the point. There is simply too much for us to notice
everything and whilst labels such as ‘pedantic cartographer’ and ‘cartographic
purist’ don’t do us any favours it does show that we still have a voice and one
that should be listened to.
ICA Map Carte
Four
examples that I particularly liked in June, starting with Charles Booth’s
famous map of London
poverty. Although not the first to portray information thematically, these maps
were truly groundbreaking in the way in which highly detailed information was
portrayed with such clarity and accuracy. Arguably way ahead of their time,
these maps were produced about 20 years after the death of Charles Dickens who
wrote so graphically about London
and its lower classes. Take the two together and you can create a truly gritty
portrait of London
in the late Victorian era.
I
suspect that not everyone would call this a ‘map’. As a means of portraying
information spatially, however, it works really well and the clarity of the message is as good as it was in the previous example. Clear use of colours, linked to the
small world inset map, with proportional symbols for the size of countries
really works well. The only thing to watch is the logarithmic scale for the
horizontal axis which can foreshorten the income differential based on the
initial visual perception.
The
typographic map of Boston
used to illustrate this example shows how a completely novel use of type can be
manipulated to represent the features of a large city. It wouldn’t work as well
in a rural area, but in the urban setting with solid blocks, punctuated by a
rectilinear road pattern the city layout is clear to see, although the designer
should have included Fenway Park to make it a true picture of Boston.
As the text accompanying the image
on the Map Carte website says, “Cartograms seem to be one of those
map types that garner polarised opinion. There are as many who find them
compelling and highly useful as there are those who find any reason to debunk
their utility.”
When done well, I think they are very useful and can be a really clear way of
communicating complex data. Yes, the distortions can look very odd to those used
to a ‘standard’ projection, but in conveying proportion by area they can do a
really good job of highlighting differences that may otherwise not be obvious.
Cartography on the web
I don’t know why it has taken me so long to stumble upon this website, 'Map of the Week' but
it is a real treasure trove of on online maps, some good some bad. Perhaps I
was subconsciously ‘channeling’ the author in my Presidential Address as he points out at
the head of his blog, “but mostly
you'll find bad cartography, bad data, and bad assumptions made from the bad
data. You'll also find a healthy serving of lazy stereotypes.” Browse his
website and you will find all sorts of maps on a huge variety of themes.
Accompanied by some entertaining and well constructed commentary. The BCS salutes
you Dug for doing a fine job of keeping mapping on the front line.
Mapping and geopolitics definitely
go hand in hand. With an article entitled ‘The Cartography of Geopolitical
Chaos’ we are reminded that the lines drawn on maps, sometimes a long time ago
are still produced to support the claims of one side against another in a border
dispute. There are quite a lot going on around the world, the most famous, or
infamous, of which is the long running dispute over the South
China Sea.
And finally
It’s that time of year when we issue forms inviting people to submit
their names for BCS Council. We like to think that everyone derives benefit
from their membership of the Society, but have you ever considered what you may
be able to do for the Society? We are all volunteers and it would be really
good to spread the expertise wider. Even if you don’t feel that Council is for
you, is there something else that you could bring? Maplines are always looking
to strengthen their editorial team, the various committees and special interest
groups would welcome new members and if you have any expertise in marketing or
publicity then we would love to hear from you.
Please do take a few minutes to think what you could contribute.
Pete Jones MBE FBCart.S CGeog
6th July 2014
E-mail: peter.jones991@mod.uk
Twitter: @geomapnut
