New Cartographies, New Aesthetics
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Chilton, S.; 2Kent, A.
1MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY Email: s.l.chilton@mdx.ac.uk
2CANTERBURY CHRIST CHURCH UNIVERSITY Email: alexander.kent@canterbury.ac.uk
Abstract
If aesthetics is central to cartographic design and if consideration for the user underpins successful cartographic praxis, what can we learn from maps produced by neocartographers, who have undertaken no associated training and are essentially ‘mapping for themselves’? In this paper we analyse some recent examples of neocartography, and, through an assessment of their functional and aesthetic value, we identify the emergence of good practice in cartographic design and reflect on its relevance in setting new standards amongst online mapping. We showcase a number of diverse examples, each of which has involved the manipulation of data before the data were mapped that significantly improves the clarity and the look and feel of the resulting maps. We include a map of crowd-sourced addresses across Great Britain (which have been mapped on OpenStreetMap) overlaid with information about the main contributors, so that in being a map of the mapped and the mappers the relative amounts of address data by district starkly reveals how ‘so much is done by so few’; a map of 12 million journeys using data from the London bicycle-hire scheme (again involving some data manipulation to convert the data to lines rather than nodes, resulting in an attractive flow-line map); and a map based on the London Underground network that displays the most commonly spoken language (after English) of people living nearby to each station. If neocartographers are demonstrating greater concern for the clarity of the message they express through their maps, it suggests a deeper acceptance of the communicative power of cartographic language and hence the desire for more effective graphicacy. We conclude by posing the question, that if the increasing availability of data and widening of the mapmaking toolkit has led to the proliferation of online maps, do the best visualisations develop and evolve as cartographic principles are ‘discovered’ rather than taught?
Keywords
Neocartography; Aesthetics; Design