This week a minor spat broke out on the twittersphere, so what’s new you ask? The chart in question is Ken Field’s somewhat ironic decision tree on whether one should make a map I need to emphasise that this is a joke that makes a serious point (IMHO) and the promotion of Ken’s excellent book Cartography. is the punchline. This prompted Amber Bosse, who describes herself as a critical cartographer, to reference Ken and other […]
cartography
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Last week this article appeared on The Guardian website suggesting that Google Maps were going to help settle the dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan over their shared border. Pakistan and Afghanistan plan to use Google Maps to help settle a border dispute that led to deadly clashes last week, officials from both sides have said. “Oh really?” I thought. Maybe the key word here is ‘help’ – maps and GPS might be a tool to […]
The idea that a map can tell a story or illuminate a timeline is not new but it appeals to the geo evangelist in me. Nowadays it is pretty easy to produce a fairly slick map that tells a story. The Knight Foundation have StoryMap JS which has some simple but elegant examples in its gallery like this Yahoo map of the World Cup nations. You could say that these maps are more about the images than […]
Last week, the Local Government Association released a new version of its Shared Services map, they say: “We have changed the appearance and layout of the map to make it more user-friendly” Hmm, have to wonder how unfriendly it was prior to the changes! Pause for a minute, try it out, see what you can discover about the 383 shared service agreements between 337 councils in England (95% of the total) that are predicted to […]
We all fall for the “trust me, I’m an expert” line once in a while. That’s because the ‘expert’ knows things that we don’t or at least he/she tells us that he does. ‘Experts’ often know how to use tools and techniques to analyse and present information or opinions that the recipients do not, so we are at a disadvantage. The open scientific method relies on some peer review of an analysis and conclusions by […]