Aesthetic Map Research Articles

A novel approach of mapping landscape aesthetic value and its validation with rural tourism data

Landscape aesthetic research that emerged from the second half of the 20th century has become increasingly appreciated and popular in the last few decades. There are two main reasons for this. On the one hand, it was recognized the role of landscape aesthetics in land use and environmental planning, management and conservation. On the other hand, its definition among Cultural Ecosystem Services has made it clear that landscape aesthetics has significant impact on human well-being and there is a need to examine it in the concept of Ecosystem Services and, in particular, Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES). The mapping of landscape aesthetics is mostly based on the exclusive evaluation of objective, biophysical landscape factors. The aim of the research was to create the landscape aesthetic map of Hungary with a novel method based on human perception. For this, a questionnaire survey and a GIS approach were used. In order to better understand the role of factors influencing the aesthetic value of the landscape, value maps separately for land cover and elevation that are decisive for the landscape experience were prepared. To validate the results of the maps, and contribute a better understanding of the interrelationship between CES, a certain tourism product was chosen, and the connection between landscape aesthetics and the offer of rural tourism was examined in Hungary and in the Danube Bend priority tourism development area. Our findings show that there is a difference in the results of the objective (GIS-based) and subjective (questionnaire-based) assessment of landscape aesthetic value with the more important role of elevation in the latter. According to our tourism product-based analysis, which represents a niche approach in its kind, landscape values are higher in the areas with rural accommodation. At the same time, based on the results of the Danube Bend region, it can also be concluded that elevation and land cover together are crucial factors in landscapes considered to be the most valuable in aesthetic terms. The most direct practical application of our research is to orientate further tourism development of the new Danube Bend area designated in 2017.

Undergraduate Geography Students Define Aesthetic Maps

Several aesthetic map definition approaches aim to describe the components, concepts and aspects of aesthetic maps. While the discussion is mostly conducted by mapping professionals and researchers, one may wonder how naïve map users would define an aesthetic map. Thirty-four undergraduate geography students answered a short questionnaire in which they defined an aesthetic map, and identified the most aesthetic map along with the reasons why they liked that particular map. Preliminary findings indicate that two important concepts for aesthetic maps are clarity and being visually pleasing/attractive. Favorite aesthetic maps ranged widely from reference to thematic to imaginary maps. Questionnaire results also indicate the emerging importance of and possible aesthetic paradigm shift towards mobile and other interactive, web-based spatial representations. Naïve aesthetic map definitions could provide an important insight into current and future aesthetic map trends.

Henry James, the English Spirit of Robert Browning, and the American Century

Henry James, the English Spirit of Robert Browning, and the American Century Susan Crowl James’s work at the turn of the century took form amid a ferment of revisionist and millennial energies in fin-de-siècle Europe without directly reflecting any of them. Yet a profound, if not surface, register of the urgency of historical, political, and cultural change drove James’s career through the personal upheavals of the 1890s into the magisterial assurance of the late novels, and in important ways this impetus is traceable to a seminal and—for James—definitive Victorian figure, Robert Browning. The great work of Browning’s improbable romantic marriage, Men and Women (1855), effectively fed on the Jamesian gap between life and art to produce self-portraiture and subtle explorations of human history and psychology in memorable poetry. Subsequently, Browning’s career in his late widowed years rebounded anew in the monumental, genre-bending epic poem The Ring and the Book (1868–69). The canon-maker of the nineteenth century’s poetic legacy to the twentieth was an alter ego at once compelling, intimidating, and necessary to James at the coincident turn of the century and of his career. Companion essays by James, “Browning in Westminster Abbey” (1890) and “The Novel in ‘The Ring and the Book’” (1912), indicate Browning’s liminal space on James’s cultural, temporal, and aesthetic map and the implicit model that James constructs in Browning. In the first essay, recognizing the occasion of Browning’s burial in the Abbey, James represents Browning as subversive amid the august, traditional, English company. Even as he joins them, James says, Browning breaks through the “rigid pale” of canonical presences in the Abbey, that “Valhalla by the Thames,” by the individualistic modernness of his poetry (EL 788, 789). In the more extended 1912 essay, Browning’s great poem The Ring and the Book has itself become the cathedral into which the irreverent and profane presence of Henry James intrudes, usurping, redefining, and assimilating Browning’s literary monument, “so vast and so essentially gothic a structure, [End Page 282] spreading and soaring and branching at such a rate,” into James’s own American spirit and century (791). In both pieces James stages a liminal scene between modern and traditional, English and American, sacred and secular, poetry and prose, and steps purposefully toward claiming that space as his own. James rescues “The Novel in ‘The Ring and the Book’”; it is the undertaking of this study to rescue the poem in The Golden Bowl. The American Browning is not a difficult construction on the face of it: the Victorian poet whose dramatic monologues gave generic form to an ideology of individualism, whose extended career and body of work kept faith and optimism available to an increasingly skeptical century and culture, whose doctrine of Incompletion was a philosophic and aesthetic program vitally linked to realism—this poet had almost as devoted and wide a following in the New World as in the Old. But for James, finally, the American Browning was the poet of “the great constringent relation between man and woman at once at its maximum and as the relation most worth while in life for either party” (EL 809), the poet whose gallery of historical voices, criminal and grotesque eccentrics, aesthetic archetypes, idealized heroes and heroines, kept before his readers a multiplicity of models of uncertain and unsatisfied desire, pragmatic questers all for “the very ideal of the real,” in James’s phrase (799). For James the challenge of The Ring and the Book was to convert the binary polarities of constraining (“constringent”) necessity and idealization dramatized in the poem to an American pragmatics of desire mediated by necessity, to “the very ideal of the real,” in The Golden Bowl. James decentered the force of transcendence in the poem, revised and recentered the poem’s focus on marriage, and projected these revisions as early as the initial notebook entries on the genesis of the novel. In his 1912 essay James recounts first the story of The Ring and the Book, then the reader’s experience of the story, and presents them as two separate and different narratives. One is the “bundle...

The Aesthetic Mapping of Nature in the Second Franklin Expedition

Like British travellers on the Grand Tour or in the English Lake District, early nineteenth-century British explorers recorded their responses to nature partly in terms of the prevailing conventions of landscape appreciation — the Sublime and the Picturesque. While searching for a Northwest Passage, the four British officers of the second Franklin expedition compiled in their published writing and painting an aesthetic map for portions of the Canadian North. The practice of these aesthetic conventions helped to preserve the sojourning Britons’ sense of identity, but also promised a certain blindness to the unique northern environment.

The Aesthetic Map of the North, 1845-1859

The aesthetics of the Sublime and the Picturesque comprised the perceptual baggage with which early nineteenth-century British explorers and travellers combed the globe. As important to their identification of space as measurements of longitude and latitude, these two schemata governed the ways in which the Canadian Arctic was described and depicted during the British search for a Northwest Passage from 1819 to 1859. During the last ten years of this period, when the majority of mariners travelled and resided in the arctic archipelago, more and more fanciful representations appeared on the aesthetic map that their writing and painting were charting. These more fanciful mappings opened a wider discrepancy between perception of landscape and environmental reality, which invited disastrous consequences for the searchers, but in the face of the growing realization that Franklin's crews had been consumed by the arctic nature, the need to mask the terror of the realm by invoking modes of describing and depicting European nature became paramount. The adaptation by means of the genial Sublime and the Picturesque of the land, rather than the traveller, if it did not provide what can be considered a realistic picture of the North today, nevertheless fortified British optimism and morale sufficiently to see the search for Franklin through to a successful conclusion.Key words: arctic exploration 1819-59, the Sublime, the Picturesque, aesthetic mapping

Two methods with different objectives: Splines and kriging

When drawing a contour map from a set of irregularly spaced data points, two methods are often used: The first corresponds to a rather aesthetic criterion and consists of obtaining contour lines which will be as “smooth”as possible and will honor the data points. This generally is the objective of the draftsman, and it can be automatically performed by the method of spline interpolation. The other method, used in kriging, is to compute the Best Linear Unbiased Estimator (B.L.U.E.),that is, to obtain a map as accurate as possible. Is it possible, in practice, to predict whether the aesthetic map will also be accurate? In this paper, we first examine the theoretical point of view: Spline interpolation is equivalent to kriging with a given (generalized)covariance. We then take an example to show how this question can be answered in practice: by testing how well the spline covariance is suited to the data.