Cartography as an Academic Field: A Lost Opportunity or a New Beginning?

Cartography, as an academic field (and as a profession) should be at the centre of the dramatic increase of place in every facet of our lives – but it is not. What happened? One answer is that the discipline is too small to meet all the needs. But, that answer bypasses the dramatic advances in GISystems over the years and the fact that the Esri User Conference attracts more than 15,000 participants while the ICA Conference in Paris (2011) attracted approximately 1300. Since the advent of GISystems in the 1960s, developments in cartography have proceeded largely in parallel to those in GISystems, but on a smaller scale. Cartographers who have engaged with GISystems and related technologies have often focused more on critique of the bad maps in GISystems than on taking a lead in integrating maps into place-based geoinformation technology and its applications. Cartography has a set of new opportunities to take a leadership role related to all aspects of locational information. Maps and location-based services are everywhere today. Our phones, cameras, and tablets are GPS-enabled, personal financial transactions (from ATM withdrawals to buying a coffee at Starbucks) are geo-located, social media users can tie their posts to location, and place references are routinely extracted from unstructured text. Maps have become a ubiquitous component of many technologies that support a wide range of activities from advancing science, through responding to emergencies, to location-based coordination with friends on a Saturday night. And, in spite of the order of magnitude difference in professional meeting size cited above, it is maps rather than GIS that capture attention. In the Google Trends search below (run in April, 2013), queries for ‘maps’ make those for ‘GIS’ seem invisible and even swamp those for ‘basketball ’, which peaks every March during the College tournament in the USA, and ‘soccer ’, which only surpassed ‘maps during the 2006 world cup (Figure 1). In addition to the general public interest in maps, I have encountered appreciation for cartographic research advances from at least a subset of researchers in other ‘visualisation’ disciplines. One example is a keynote by Pat Hanrahan (the CANON Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University) at ACM SIGSPATIAL in 2009 on ‘Cartography and Information Presentation: A Graphics/Visualization Perspective ’. In his abstract, he says ‘The first part of the presentation describes how cartographic thinking has informed information visualisation. Information visualisation research has benefited enormously from the work of great cartographers including Jacques Bertin and Eduard Imhof’. While our historical cartographic roots remain important, as do well-designed maps as the end products of a professional cartographer’s skill, we should not live in the past or restrict our focus only to the map as an end product. An orders of magnitude bigger opportunity exists for academic and professional cartographers to be creators of dynamic and flexible map-based analytical tools that leverage the increasingly massive and heterogeneous sources of geographic information being generated today. Similar opportunities exist to be authors of dynamic map applications that enable users to create their own custom (and well-designed) maps. Additional opportunities exist for cartographers who carry out empirical research focused on understanding cognitive issues that underpin use of interactive map-based applications and those who apply usability engineering approaches to insure that the applications (and maps within them) meet user needs and engage those users. The start to this essay may have seemed pessimistic. But, I am actually quite optimistic about the future of cartographic research and practice . if we are collectively proactive in re-creating the role of cartographers as thought leaders in strategies to represent the world and enable understanding of its dynamic human and environmental processes.