John Clinton Sherman was born in Toronto, Canada. John was an educator and a cartographer. Momentous events took place during his lifetime--two World Wars, the advent of broadcast television, the arrival of astronauts on the moon, the onset of the AIDs epidemic, establishment of a global positioning satellite network, the end of the Cold War, and intelligent vehicle navigation systems. His discipline was changed forever (several times in his life span) by the technologies and social forces manifest in these and other events. The discipline was also changed by his efforts to promote automation in cartography, and to promote in education. After completing a master's degree on a regional geography topic (Sherman 1944) at Clark University, John served as Teaching Fellow and then as Instructor while working on a doctoral dissertation on climate (Sherman 1947) at the University of Washington. Upon completion of his dissertation, he took the position of Assistant Professor and remained at Washington 49 years until his retirement in 1986. Velikonja (1997) states that John was the first full-time faculty member at any American university, recounting that in 1954, Department Chair Donald Hudson re-organized the Washington Geography curriculum to incorporate four concentrations including cartography. Quoting Hudson (1954), Velikonja (1997, p. 5) wrotes: ... It is the field outside of teaching in which college graduates can most readily find employment. At the end of his career, John Sherman was widely recognized (with Arthur Robinson and George Jenks) as one of the three fathers of academic cartography in the United States. In the years when John began his academic career, writing a dissertation in was not common; pursuing fundamental research in was unheard off Cartography was considered a necessary skill for geographers but an area lacking a theoretical component. It was largely through the work of Sherman, Jenks, and Robinson that academic research programs in took hold and grew at North American universities. John taught map use, map design and production, map symbolization, information sources for mapping, as well as advanced seminars and independent projects. Many of the principles for cartographic production that he espoused have turned out to prophesy the principles of Geographic Information Science that my generation of academic teachers and researchers now emphasize, decades later. John's research focused largely on special- purpose map production, including articles on domain-specific mapping of land and undersea topography (Sherman 1962, 1964, 1972). He published several relief models and terrain maps (Sherman 1950, 1952, 1958, 1960, 1963). He was also known for atlas production (Sherman and Chapman 1967, Sherman et al. 1982), and for official state and county maps (Sherman 1959, 1961a). His best known, special-purpose mapping research centered on a special user group, namely the visually impaired. Beginning with a 1955 article in a geography education journal, Sherman studied map design, map-making, and subject-testing of map use, for blind and partially sighted target groups (Sherman 1955, 1959, 1965, 1970, 1975, 1977, 1986). One of the amazing aspects of John's research was his insistence that prior to designing a map, the mapmaker must become familiar with the cognitive perspective of the target map user. When I took his map design seminar (1980, I think), John assigned us to travel the campus exclusively for two days (in pairs) with one student blindfolded and the other guiding and avoiding possible catastrophe. Following this unusual assignment, he began his course segment on design of tactual maps. I can't speak for my colleagues, but that assignment certainly sensitized me to particular routes across campus, to the sound of Drumheller Fountain as a strong navigational cue, to the tactile difference on the soles of one's shoes crossing the slippery red brick pavement in front of Suzallo Library, and to orienting myself by the smell of the cherry blossoms in the quadrangle outside Smith Hall. …
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Aug 26, 2023
Sung-Bo Kim + 1
Open Access
