Cartographic Perspectives Research Articles

Cartographic perspectives on spatial and thematic levels of detail in augmented reality: a review of existing approaches

ABSTRACT Augmented reality (AR) is a rapidly advancing technology that enhances users’ perception of the real world by overlaying virtual elements. The geospatial community has been gradually focusing on AR because of its ability to create immersive spatial experiences and facilitate spatial learning. However, designing effective AR interfaces poses several challenges, including managing information overload, providing intuitive user interaction, and optimizing system performance. The management of the Level of Detail (LoD) is a crucial part of an AR-enhanced cartographic representations as it can greatly impact the quantity, accuracy, and usefulness of the information being conveyed and enhance the readability and usability of an application. In this paper, we present a systematic review of published research on the management of LoD for AR cartographic representations based on various dimensions that focus on the types of data that are visualized, the techniques used, and the user actions that trigger LoD change. A corpus of fifteen scientific papers involving different LoD management techniques within AR environments have been analyzed. The limited number of papers implies that this kind of applications is in its infancy. The review provides a synthesis of existing knowledge and identifies challenges for future research in this exciting and dynamic field.

The University of Patras, Greece, its city, and international students: insights from multiple cartographic perspectives

ABSTRACTIn this paper the interactions among the city of Patras, the University of Patras and its temporary international students are examined with the use of cartographic tools such as GIS, cartograms and mental mapping. Distribution maps of the Erasmus international agreements of the university suggest that the cultural profile of the city influences the content of the international partnerships of the university and motivates exchange students from abroad. On the other hand, the provision of cultural courses and experiences on campus increases the international students’ attraction to and engagement with the city. The international students manage to acquire a sound understanding of the city within 3–4 months of stay and are able to express themselves and convey much information. Their perceptions are expressed in sketch or digital maps that they create. Their drawings, if further processed in the form of cartograms can be very informative, since they highlight the strengths and weaknesses of their life in the city and in particular the failures in urban planning. The results of this study can contribute to the upgrading of the urban cultural environment, and the enhancement of the university internationalization strategy, while maximizing the international students’ satisfaction as agents of urban improvement.

A thank-you, long overdue

In 2005 discussions at the NACIS meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, forced me to think differently and more clearly about issues of ethics and morals both in cartography but also elsewhere in the "knowledge professons." An article in Cartographic Perspectives became a tool for this exploration. The result, after a decade of thinking and rethinking, is a new book titled Ethics in Everyday Life. This brief piece is a thank-you to members whose questions and comments were so critical in forcing me to new ways of thinking both about maps and about the ideas they present.

Placing Plants in Territory

ABSTRACTIn this article, we use plants to think about territory, a concept that is at once a bulwark of social theory and an under-theorized category of social analysis. Scholarship on plants brings together three overlapping approaches to territory: biological and behaviorist theories; representational and cartographic perspectives; and more-than-human analysis. We argue that these three approaches are not mutually exclusive. Rather, different epistemologies of territory overlap and are imbricated within each other. We further argue that these three approaches to territory inform three distinct domains of territoriality: legibility and surveillance; ordering and classification; and exclusion and inclusion. Through examples of how plants operate in these three domains, we illustrate the analytical potential that a more-than-human approach to territory provides. We conclude, however, that attention to the particularities of plant ecologies can help move multispecies discussions more firmly into the realm of the political economic.

The Role of Geographic Expertise in International Border Disputes: A Study of the Middle of Lake Erie Through Historical and Cartographic Perspectives

A great deal of consequence attaches to the placement, marking, mapping, and monitoring of borders and the lines that separate nations. Throughout the article attention is drawn to the role of geographic regional expertise and map analysis in providing the background for territorial and related disputes over sovereignty. This article traces, through maps, the evolving story of the international boundary between the United States and Canada in the vicinity of Lake Erie. Between the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and the delimitation of the actual boundary between the United States and the Dominion of Canada in Lake Erie in the 1820s, the depiction of the boundary was prone to two types of error: the gross inaccuracy of the base maps on which the lines were drafted and the imprecision of the words and methods used to describe or compute the location of the boundary. Although much less controversial than in the Northeast United States, where settlement was delayed until the Webster–Ashburton Treaty in 1842, the issues were nevertheless quite significant in Lake Erie. A series of partial efforts to describe the boundary, culminating in a fishery dispute, finally led to a definitive effort by the International Waterways Boundary Commission. Perhaps surprisingly, given the date of the original declaration in 1783, this did not happen until 1908. This article provides an opportunity to review both historical and cartographic aspects of the problem of defining a boundary in a water area and uncovers a forgotten gem—a paper that exactly described an appropriate analytical cartographic technique—the medial axis.

Introduction to Maps and Mapping in Kenneth Slessor’s Poetic Sequence The Atlas

This is the first of seven articles comprising a book-length treatment of The Atlas by the acclaimed Australian poet and journalist Kenneth Slessor (1901–1971). Hisreputation as Australia’s first modernist poet and pioneer of her national poeticidentity began with his 1932 collection Cuckooz Contrey, which opened with one ofthe most original interpretations of cartography in verse: the five-poem sequence The Atlas. Fascinated by maps and navigators’ tales, Slessor began each poem withthe title of a map or an atlas by a cartographer prominent during Europe’s “goldenage of cartography,” and then alluded to that particular work throughout thepoem. The sequence celebrates the cartographic achievements of the seventeenthcentury while imaginatively recreating the worlds portrayed in very differentmaps, including Robert Norton’s plan of Algiers (“The King of Cuckooz”), JohnOgilby’s road maps (“Post-roads”), Joan Blaeu’s plan-view of Amsterdam (“DutchSeacoast”), John Speed’s world map (“Mermaids”), and a map of the West Indies,supposedly by Nicolas or Adrien Sanson, featuring buccaneers and a seafight (“TheSeafight”). Yet none of these maps appears in Slessor’s collections or critical studiesof his work. Nor have his poems been juxtaposed with the atlases, maps, or rarecatalogue of maps that inspired them.I plan to fill these gaps in six future issues of Cartographic Perspectives. Fivewill begin with an Atlas poem—reprinted in its entirety and in the order ofits appearance within the sequence. Analysis of the poem’s content will befollowed by discussion of its introductory quote or epigraph, which Slessor (ashis poetry notebook makes clear) found in the map catalogue. Next comes anexamination of both the cartographer and the map highlighted in the epigraph.By reproducing the map as well as the catalogue’s description of the map, eacharticle will uncover the cartographic connections between Slessor’s publishedpoem and its manuscript versions, its map(s), and the map catalogue. AnEpilogue will round out my series by exploring the unique atlas-like structure ofSlessor’s sequence and identifying the likely author of the catalogue that Slessorcreatively transformed into The Atlas.My Introduction, the only part of the series published in this issue, providesthe background for what will become the first extended examination of The Atlas. Opening with a brief biography of Slessor as poet, journalist, and man-about-Sydney, it surveys Cuckooz Contrey before turning to The Atlas, which debuted inthat collection. The effort that Slessor lavished on his sequence and on masteringthe period in which it is set are revealed throughout the notebook in whichhe drafted all five poems. Reviewing his corpus shows that The Atlas uniquelycombines strategies apparent in Slessor’s earlier and later poems, includinghis emphasis on the arts and the use of illustrations to heighten his poetry’sallure. The Introduction presents the maps created to illustrate his poetry,especially Strange Lands, made by the famously controversial Norman Lindsayand featured as the frontispiece of Cuckooz Contrey. Slessor’s poetic allusionsto maps lead to the magnificent nautical library in which he may have foundthe inspiration for The Atlas. Yet, as the second half of this article demonstrates,that library collection has proved one of many challenges to producing thisgroundbreaking study.

Participation Cartography: The Presentation of Self in Spatio-Temporal Terms

In this paper, I focus on disclosures by one participant as enabled by a kind of artistic practice that I term “participation cartography.” By using “participation cartography” as a framework for the analysis of Running Stitch (2006), a piece by Jen Southern (U.K.) and Jen Hamilton (Canada), I demonstrate that disclosures by participants in this practice are to be seen as a form of self-mapping that positions the self in relation to a given performance space. These self-positionings present the self in spatio-temporal terms and by means of performative narratives that re-define the subject from an isolated individual into a participant within an unfolding live process.

Freeing CP: GIS&T and NACIS in the Open Educational Resources Movement

This article positions higher education in geographic information science and technology (GIS&T), including cartography, in relation to the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. After defining OER and the movement it denotes I compare several initiatives designed to promote free sharing of GIS&T-related educational resources and, in one special case, free provision of graduate education. Finally I consider a justification for conceiving Cartographic Perspectives as an open educational resource, and for freeing it from its current exclusive distribution to NACIS members, subscribers and their patrons.

Results of the 2009 Cartographic Perspectives Readership Survey

Results of the 2009 Cartographic Perspectives Readership Survey

<span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">Cartographic Cinema</span> (review)

Reviewed by: Cartographic Cinema Joel Black Tom Conley. Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. viii + 265 pp. Following his 1996 study on "cartographic writing," The Self-Made Map, Tom Conley explores the "cartographic impulse" in cinema, a visual and movement-oriented medium that, even more than written texts, is rife with maps and mapping techniques. More like maps than literature, films involve seeing as well as reading—two "modes of intellection" that have tended to go their separate ways since the Renaissance. Conley is particularly drawn to films directed by auteurs (most of them French) who "conceive and execute [their] films as mapped forms" requiring "close and detailed analysis" and "complex modes of decipherment." Being an auteur is less a matter of presenting a unique vision of the world or a unified body of work than of producing films informed by a "cartographic consciousness." Such films beckon attentive viewers to study them as maps which, upon close and patient inspection, lead to a treasure of concealed meanings and cinematic/cartographic references. The most obvious sign of a cartographic consciousness is the actual presence of maps in films. In "a classic map-film" like Casablanca, or in Raoul Walsh's High Sierra, maps are extrinsic elements that help viewers to get their bearings by identifying the locale or tracing the journey depicted in the film. (Besides the "desperate journeys" depicted in these films, Conley traces the sentimental journeys of Truffaut's Les Mistons and Louis Malle's Les Amants; the latter film's affective landscape is presented as a "Carte du Tendre" harking back to Mademoiselle Scudery's feminine alternative to Cartesian military cartographies.) Maps may also appear as diegetic elements in the film itself, either as plot devices or as part of the mise-en-scéne, where they help the characters to orient themselves or illuminate their emotional or psychological states. Some of Conley's most perceptive analyses focus on films that incorporate "map rooms" of various kinds—from the officers' quarters and prison cells of Renoir's La Grande Illusion, to the makeshift office next to a Nazi torture chamber in Rosselini's Roma, cittB aperta, to the classroom of Truffaut's Les 400 coups, to the motel room of Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise, to Marcus Aurelius' tent in Scott's Gladiator. Despite their differences, all these map rooms are sites where the protagonists are shown struggling to get their geographical and moral bearings; one thinks of the amnesiac protagonist in Christopher Nolan's Memento filling his motel room with photos and bodily inscriptions that serve as mnemonic aids. [End Page 372] Besides tracing the various functions that maps play as part of the cinematic mise-en-scéne—providing a key or "legend" to the film's meanings—Conley reads some films as maps in their own right, especially films in which the "image-fact requires the shot to be read as might a map." Thus, René Clair's first film, Paris qui dort (1924), features vertiginous, "icarian" views of a strangely immobile Paris shot from atop the Eiffel Tower. Montage and editing effects provide striking examples of film's cartographic qualities, as Conley shows in the transitions between scenes (especially wipes and lap dissolves) in Roma, cittB aperta, High Sierra, and Casablanca where two separate images are simultaneously visible in the frame—often a shot of a map that overlays or blends into a live-action sequence. Such doubled images not only offer a subliminal commentary on the film, but highlight its "map-effect," inviting viewers to decipher its different layers of text and images which form a kind of palimpsest. Indeed, the most intriguing feature that maps are shown to share with film is their density, their ability to organize a vast quantity of data in a limited space through their conjunction of words and images. In his analysis of Renoir's La Grande Illusion, Conley suggests that the film's deep, cartographic perspectives afford a more complete vision than that provided by the classical, verbal art of literature or the modern, visual technology of photography. More than mere reading matter, films and maps involve their spectators in acts of seeing...

A Map Is an Image Proclaiming Its Objective Neutrality: A Response to Denil

A Map Is an Image Proclaiming Its Objective Neutrality: A Response to Denil Denis Wood Independent Scholar Raleigh, NC I’d like to thank Mark Denil for his thoughtful response to my article “Map Art.”1 The article, and the catalogue of 218 map artists that accompanied it, indeed all of the articles in what was essentially a special issue of Cartographic Perspectives devoted to map art, were necessarily preliminary forays into what is still largely a terra incognita.2 All were offered in the full expectation of being, at the very least, amended. Omissions, for example, were egregious. Not only did I fail to include in the catalogue Andy Warhol, whose map of missiles in the USSR is fast becoming an iconic exemplar of map art,3 but through sheer inadvertence our own Steve Holloway, whose map art has long since graced the cover of Cartographic Perspectives.4 Such lapses should be made good once the catalogue goes online as a wiki, but the wiki will not address the conceptual problems Denil highlighted. The following remarks, therefore, are intended to clarify what I have been claiming makes a map a map, that is, what I’ve been calling the map’s mask.

Understanding person^space^map relations: Cartographic and developmental perspectives.

Understanding person^space^map relations: Cartographic and developmental perspectives.

Ethical Problems in Cartography: A Roundtable Commentary

The problem of defining and actualizing standards of ethical conduct troubles many professions, including cartography. In an attempt to formalize the ethical discourse in cartography the editors of Cartographic Perspectives invited five contributors to discuss what they perceive as important ethical problems in the discipline. The contributors were selected from the three major sectors of the cartographic enterprise: commercial mapping organizations, government mapping agencies, and university geography departments offering cartography programs. The contributors identify personal and institutional vigilance in product quality assurance, map plagiarism through violation of copyright law, and conflicts of interest as important ethical issues. The commentary concludes by questioning the nature and validity of cartography's claim to truth ("accuracy"), and asserts that cartographic ethics cannot be extricated from the values of the larger society which commissions the production of cartographic information.

Things Maps Don't Tell Us: An Adventure into Map Interpretation

The book is a treasure trove of tidbits describing how the world around us came about. . . . Things Maps Don't Tell Us actually communicates a great deal about the things maps can tell us if we care to look carefully underneath the printed symbols.--James E. Young, Cartographic Perspectives