[HN Gopher] New Theoretical Research Trends in Cartography (2001)
___________________________________________________________________
New Theoretical Research Trends in Cartography (2001)
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 42 points
Date : 2025-04-04 18:23 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.researchgate.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.researchgate.net)
| chippadoodle wrote:
| What is the interest in this article from 2001? There is a rich
| GIS and visualization history that has happened since then ... if
| you really want to see something radical look at Wild Bill
| Bunge's work
| oersted wrote:
| > Until the middle of the 20th Century, cartography was more an
| art than a science.
|
| Strange perspective, accurate nautical charts were critical
| infrastructure in the age of sail, making them and using them was
| a very technical endeavor backed by significant financing. The
| brightest scientists of the period spent a lot energy on the
| longitude problem and similar navigation bottlenecks. Accurate
| land maps were also important for military and state finance
| purposes. Much of early mathematics and astronomy were focused on
| measuring the Earth and pinpointing your location.
|
| I'm not sure if map-making was a science explicitly, there was no
| UX academia like there is now, but it was certainly a serious
| engineering field rather than an "art", and dismissing that rich
| history of know-how seems like a poor foundation for a review of
| map-making theory.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm guessing the authors here are referring to the fact that
| many places were really poorly drawn. There was high detail in
| regions where the map makers were local to but this got fuzzy
| real fast. Some would even do things like plant fake cities on
| their map as a means of fraud detection. A secret signature if
| you will. Someone who copied their map was likely to copy the
| fake place.
|
| You're definitely right that this has a lot to do with early
| mathematics but remember that that is a small part of map
| making. How do you define coast lines? Rivers? Borders? The
| devil is in the details. With older maps the general shapes
| would be (usually) accurate but it could get fuzzy around the
| edges. Literally. It's not like they could get a picture from
| space, or even from the sky. It would take years to measure
| many things that would take us minutes now
| gsf_emergency wrote:
| Those of us who hunt for connections between cartography &
| cryptography are sometimes confronted with direct
| identifications of the 2:
|
| https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/02/24/money.
| ..
|
| (Only half-serious; dont dvote me!)
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Cartography is strongly opinionated. The dirty secret, which I
| don't think most people realize, is that there is no correct,
| reproducible source upon which to base the creation of a map.
| Every frame of reference is known to be wrong in material ways,
| so maps are a bit of a polite fiction that work well if you
| don't look at them too closely. Maps are more suggestions than
| truth even in the best of cases.
|
| Maps are still useful but as the old saying goes, maps are not
| the territory. Physics puts a practical bound on how closely a
| map can represent the territory that in modern contexts turns
| out to be important.
| tomgp wrote:
| True, but that's not so much a dirty secret as something
| cartographers will loudly and endlessly tell anyone who'll
| listen within moments of meeting them
| gryn wrote:
| Title needs a (2001) I skimmed the paper looking for new insight
| only to see it talk about stuff that's already prevalent.
|
| QGIS, FME, D3, Open layers, Mapbox, and others GIS related tools
| has been prevalent in all the workplaces I've worked at that
| needed something related to this topic.
| superfist wrote:
| Parts of theoretical cartography are model example how
| Information Theory Bandwagon [1] works:
|
| 'By the mid-1970s any historical account of the development of
| models of cartographic communication becomes unmanageable very
| largely because of their increasing popularity and the way in
| which authors making use of them learn and borrow ideas from one
| another. One commentator faced with the proliferation of these
| models is distressed by being 'awash in a sea of scientific-
| sounding terminology mostly pirated from other fields such as
| electrical engineering.' [2]
|
| [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774
| [2] Christopher Board, "Cartographic Communication",
| Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic
| Information and Geovisualization, 1981
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-07 23:01 UTC)