Undisciplined Cartography - what are the speach and the message of our Maps, or should we refer to "Cartograms" ?
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Santos, J.G.
1DEPARTAMENTO DE GEOGRAFIA - UNIVERSIDADE DE COIMBRA Email: jgs966@gmail.com
Abstract
The concept of "Cartogram" is back on the agenda. Discussed in several fora, scientific, academic and even informal, the term divides opinions and approaches, and calls attention for the "defense of the lady" - the subject of cartographic representation, because it is of thematic cartography that we are talking about. This exercise is, therefore, a simple step forward, aiming to reach a common awareness for the need of order and discipline on using terms and concepts that must hold together a universal language, despite the spectrum of scientific disciplines that use cartographic representation to comunicate or just translate their native information. Starting from a historical review on the use of the term "Cartogram" that rather than its concept is, perhaps, more concensual, we stepped into the core of a relational discussion, involving the approaches of some Authors, in particular, some classic as Minardi (1851), Raisz (1934), Robinson (1967, 1982), and Tobler (1973, 1976, 1986). This procedure led us to try to establish probable links between the results of ancient studies and those conducted on the subject by modern / contemporary Authors, among which we include Monmonier (1991, 2009), Edelsbrunner & Waupotitsch (1997), Dorling (2006), Florison et al. (2006) and, also, another remarkable Tobler' s work (2004), an essay that is more than a simple revisiting to the theme that, as it turns out, is expensive to plaintiff. Why? The answer is simple: it is urgent to discipline the Cartographic Language. A debutante step could only be taken towards the need of waking on map informal users and producers for the existence of cartographic rules and principles that must be accomplished, so that we all might know what everyone is talking about when we refer to certain terms and / or techniques. For instance, the misuse of terms as "Cartography" or "Map", widly spread out, should be replaced by "Cartogram" once it is often related to monospecific / monothematic information which appears deliberately inflated in terms of visualization of the data intended to be represented, a circumstance bowed before the imperative of giving focus to the topic under study - the geospatial and geostatistical behavior of the variables that define the scale, the distance or the area of a certain theme. The Dorling' s lesson (2009 ) when he says that " ... A cartogram can be thought of as a map, wherein at least one of the aspects of scale, such as distance or area, is deliberately distorted to be proportional to a variable of interest ..." proves our previous reflection. Beyond the critics concerning these procedures, cartograms are very useful, and are related to correct map representation techniques, but we all should know what we intend to say when terms as "Map" or "Cartogram" are used. By the way, does anyone remember the old mosaic of rectangles that structures the amazing Emile Levasseur' s oeuvre (1870) - "Cartogram of Europe", recently published in the work of Tobler (2004, 29 ) ?
Keywords
Cartograms and Maps; Anamorphosis; Visualisation