As Phillip Muehrcke (an Emeritus Professor of Geography from the University of Wisconsin) details, the cartographer must answer four questions: Where? When? What? Why? As an example (Figure 3.5), a cartographer can create a map of San Diego (where) showing current (when) traffic patterns (what) so that an ambulance can take the fastest route to an emergency (why).Ĭredit: © California Department of Transportation. 3.1.1.1 Selectionĭepending on a map’s purpose, cartographers (map makers) select what information to include and what information to leave out. The process of map abstraction includes at least five major (interdependent) steps: (a) selection, (b) classification, (c) simplification, (d) exaggeration, and (e) symbolization (Muehrcke and Muehrcke, 1992). Even to achieve a screen-sized map of the world on your computer, map abstraction is fundamental to representing entities in a legible manner. It has become possible to map the world on the head of a pin, or even a smaller space, as shown here: Art of Science: World on the Head of a Pin, but, most details get left out. They are not scored and do not affect your grade in any way. You may take practice quizzes as many times as you wish. Registered Penn State students should return now take the self-assessment quiz about the Overview. In the cartographic process as outlined above, the fundamental component in generating a map to depict the environment is itself a process – the process of map abstraction. Through their provision of a viewpoint on the world, maps influence our spatial behavior and spatial preferences and shape how we view the environment. Finally, users make decisions and take action based upon what they find in the map. Next, the map user reads, analyzes, and interprets the map by decoding the symbols and recognizing patterns. Next, the map maker uses the data and attempts to signify it visually on a map (encoding), applying generalization, symbolization, and production methods that will (hopefully) lead to a depiction that can be interpreted by the map user in the way the map maker intended (its purpose). As map makers collect data from the environment (through technology and/or remote sensing), they use their perception to detect patterns and subsequently prepare the data for map creation (i.e., they think about the data and its patterns as well as how to best visualize them on a map). The cartographic process is a cycle that begins with a real or imagined environment. Smith, © The Pennsylvania State University Redesigned after lecture slide provided by Barbara Buttenfield, University of Colorado, Department of Geography.
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