Sunday in the Park with Joe

We had a lovely visit in New Haven with Joe and family. Well, New Haven was pretty muggy, but their apartment was pleasantly air-conditioned and it was great to have time to catch up with everyone.

Joe and I like to talk when we visit, and we managed to sneak a few longer conversations into the visit. Basically rehashing previous discussions, and I think (Joe can argue with me) realizing we were saying the same thing more or less, but in a different dialect. I think. Maybe. Ten days later and my memory grows dimmer... And those little kids are distracting.

Our main sticking point had to do with the idea of neutrality/arbitrariness. I like the former because to me it evokes Switzerland: there's nothing inherent in that patch of land that makes it "neutral," it's just agreed that it is, and so it functions usefully as a place intentionally outside of international alliances and conflicts. Joe likes arbitrary in part because of its root in "arbitration": an arbitrary decision is originally one reached through arbitration. But I think we realized we basically agree, that utter objectivity/neutrality is impossible, but that finding pidgins and setting arbitrary benchmarks allows people to work with one another.

Where the conversation really got interesting I think is where it veered into religion. It feels to me like a lot of the background to this blog is at root religious: the conflict between objectivists and subjectivists looks a lot like the conflicts between universalists and "specifists" in my Quaker meeting and in the world as a whole. To me, the point is not which one is right; the point is that both are necessary, and finding a Grand Theory of Everything should be the goal. That might look like nestling one inside the other, or explaining one as a social function and the other as a personal function, or one as temporally long term and the other as momentary.

Who can say...

****

For jollies, I also attach a link Joe sent me from Archinect, trying to rethink the architectural plan, another orthographic representational school. A map really, of planned space. Anyway, some intriguing suggestions of how to turn the Plan on its head and bring it out of the camphor-filled cubbyhole it's been relegated to.

My only question as a cartographer is, where's the ground?

When usefulness has passed

I always come away from Steven's pages feeling simultaneously held to a higher standard and frustrated by something unnamed. This morning glancing through it, I got thinking about "usefulness" and how Steven would think about it. Thinking back to an earlier post about eugenics, and how a big part of where it went wrong was in thinking of people's "usefulness."

I ran Google on "usefulness has passed," and came up with an archive article from the NY Times, 1917. Mayor Mitchel of New York, speaking at the cornerstone laying for a new institution for the feeble-minded on Randall Island in NY City:

"True, eleven of the buildings on this island dated back to before the year 1869, so the institution, by the life of in the City of New York, was old. Those buildings, Commissioner Kingsbury said, had not been built as the buildings of the cities bf old, to endue a hundred or a thousand years, but it looked from the way they were used, from the tenacity with which the city clung to their use after they had become useless, that the city regarded them as built to last a thousand years, no matter what their condition. That was the trouble with the institutions on Randall's Island; though the buildings were constructed to last but a few years and had outlived. their usefulness, they were treated as if they were there to remain forever.

"In an institution such as this the buildings should last no longer than their usefulness, and these buildings which are being erected today, under this appropriation of $1,600,000, ought to endure no longer than their usefulness, and when the day of that usefulness has passed, because better methods have been found for the treatment of the who may occupy them, because better methods of construction have been devised and more scientific of treatment, then these buildings must come down and new buildings take their places that will meet the higher standards of a later date. That is progress, and nothing short of it is progress.

Not sure why I find this such an interesting piece of random retrieval, but I do. The backside of usefulness is uselessness and disposal. When a thing or a person is valued for function, than when the function ceases, it needs to be gotten rid of. Like the "feeble-minded" in the eugenics way of thinking.

Like outdated maps.

I have a bunch of outdated maps in my library. I like how many of them look (I have a particular predilection for John Bartholomew's mapping from the first part of the twentieth century, and for oil-company maps of the immediate post-WWII period), and so I find them useful as a reference, and I hang on to them. But they are not useful in the same sense that I rely on an up-to-date map of the world; the old maps tell me about ways of communication that have been passed over, and ways people thought the world could be looked at "usefully" 100 years ago.

Big American cities have a history of tearing down old buildings that are no longer deemed "useful." Minneapolis tore down large parts of its downtown fringe in the post-WWII era (notably the Gateway District). More recently, we've seen a movement to gut the buildings and refit them for modern use (like the building my office is in, a former seed company headquarters and warehouse).

But can you do that for information that has gone stale? What use is a bus schedule from 1954? A TV schedule from 1970? A street map from 1890? They have become relics, clues to help us figure things out about the past. They themselves are not renovated for present use, but preserved like house museums.

What about weeds, plants we do not deem useful?

When we have a task at hand, having useful tools for the task makes sense. When we have tools at hand, do those then make tasks? At what point do those tools them impose themselves back on us?

Thanks, Steven.

Exemplary cartography

A few months ago, I talked about "Experiential and Formal Models of Geographic Space," by David M. Mark and Andrew U. Frank, mostly in terms of its discussion of experienced vs measured space. But the piece that keeps coming back to me is the distinction between two ways of defining something:

Rosch and her co-workers discovered that, in many cases, all members of a category are not 'equal'. For example, when asked to give an example of a bird, subjects tend to name robins and sparrows as examples far more often than they mention turkeys or penguins or ducks. [...] Lakoff (1987) later discussed this in terms of a radial structure for some categories. He noted that peripheral members of different arms of a radially-organized categories may have nothing in common, except different chains of resemblance to some common prototype.

The ideas turned up recently in a discussion at Meeting about Quaker identity... we don't have a catechism, but neither is it an "anybody can call themselves a Quaker" sort of thing. I realized mid-discussion that exemplar-based definitions actually work quite well for Quakers: what we have in common is no one aspect of belief or habit, but a "direction" towards a common ideal. We come towards that ideal (in specific, it was suggested that the Friends Testimonies are the common center) from a lot of directions, meaning there is very little we identifiably have in common throughout the Friends community, but what we share is that common set of ideals we all one way or another strive for.

On the walk home today, it occurred me that the same sort of exemplar-based commonality is true of the art world. I was walking through our building, which is filled with artists studios, and has an open studio every first Thursday of the month, and as usual I was struck by the utter variety of presentations. What on earth do they have in common?

What they have in common is reaction/reference to a common body of visual creations. Some choose to imitate the physical form (paint, pastel, frame, canvas), others the subject matter (landscape, portrait, etc), still others the philosphical emphasis (beauty, truth, ineffability, effability) of some portion of the corpus of western art or of non-western traditions that are generally accepted into that corpus.

But as a whole, there is little or nothing one can say about everything done in the arts world. What makes it art is that it follows one or more traditions of that arts world.

What drives cartographers crazy is when artists dbehave the same way about maps: an artist makes something that follows some aspect of the corpus of the cartographic tradition, and calls it a map. But it doesn't share all or a majority of the aspects, or an aspect the cartographer in question feels is crucial, and so the artis calling it a map feels like presumption, or false advertising.

What's interesting to me personally is that I came to maps out of a desire to make something that looked like a map, not out of a passion for geography specifically. I was playing at maps, really, when I made my first maps back in junior high school—play subsidized by school time, but play nonetheless. I did a lot of making things that looked like "real" things as a kid: a friend and I set up a pretend company that published magazines and travel brochures, flags, and made models. It was a lot of fun.

So like artists who are trying to make something that follows the spirit and/or form of the arts traditions, I started out with a goal of making things that "looked like maps." No ontology, just imitation. But perhaps because maps are such an ontology-grounded field, I've wound up on the other side, grimacing at some piece of art that in no way functions as a practical tool, but which the creator claims is a map.

And they called me an studio art major. Harumph.

Qualified

Further to my last post, the thread on James Fee's blog took an interesting turn in which John from Jerzee complained against unqualified people creeping into GIS (especially in management), I responded noting that I had only three classes in grad school and a studio art degree and have built a successful career on that, and John responded (in part):

Nat: I find your post irritating to say the least. Your example is based on getting an entry level job you were never qualified for then learning on the job and taking a higher position you should’ve never been qualiifed for either.
My argument is based on people like yourself who think you can pick up every detail on the job. Unfortunately, you can not and that is why formal training is neccesary. All my cartographic skills were developed in training and college. I applied them in my job but I never gained more cartgraphic training at work.
On the job training teaches us how to make cost effective maps not cartographically correct maps.

Not surprisingly, I take umbrage at the idea I am unqualified for my job. But the whole exchange sets up for me a fundamental divide not just between GIS and cartography, but between people whose job it is to manage and operate a complex system, and people whose job it is to make something or perform a service. For the former, training is essential; for the latter, seat-of-the-pants can work, especially if the system is not too complex.

There was an article last year in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande about checklists in medicine. A doctor named Peter Pronovost has found that using checklists for procedures (such as intubation) where every step is essential can save lives, because in the heat of the moment even the best nurses or doctors can have a momentary lapse. In a relatively simple system, like driving a car, one can readjust, but at some point that is a recipe for disaster.

The classic example, and the origin of Pronovost's idea, is the 1935 crash of the prototype Boeing airplane later called the "flying fortress." The plane crashed not for mechanical reasons, but because the plane had gotten too complex to fly by the seat of the pants. So:

...the Army purchased a few aircraft from Boeing as test planes, and some insiders remained convinced that the aircraft was flyable. So a group of test pilots got together and considered what to do.
They could have required Model 299 pilots to undergo more training. But it was hard to imagine having more experience and expertise than Major Hill, who had been the U.S. Army Air Corps’ chief of flight testing. Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had advanced. In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert.

So what does all this have to do with cartography and GIS?

A GIS is a very complex suite of software. It takes all one's expertise and attention to make sure it does what it needs to do, and it can do an enormous amount. But because of this, GIS experts tend to be very focused on the system.

Cartographers (or at least the graphic-designy ones I identify with) tend to have a less intensive approach to the tool(s), and spend more time on the product as an organic whole. The cartographer will be working back and forth between comparatively simple adjustments of the map elements and stepping back and judging how it is working from the point of view of a user.

All extremely generalized, but as I think about the difference between liberal arts types and technical types—and how they approach the nature of a job—it makes a lot of sense. Most of us find ourselves having to meld the two approaches: the generalist has to learn some very specific tool-based skills (and yes, training of one sort or another is usually necessary), and the specialist has to learn some basic "liberal arts" skills like business writing and customer service (often on the job).

[updated 2-17-13 with new links]

In front of a crowd in your underwear

Interesting thread on James Fee's blog. It's an argument over where to draw the "good enough" line when making a map under tight deadline and budget. The argument I'm fighting is that "cartography" (and in some posters' minds this seems to mean "making the data look pretty") is an optional item that can be left off if time gets tight.

This seems to me to be like arguing that getting dressed is an optional part of a public speaking gig, that the clothes you choose don't really matter. Showing up for a speech in a dirty t-shirt and cutoffs isn't a big deal if you run out of time.

Good design takes practice. I've been doing this for 17 years now, and I still have a lot to learn (hence, in part, this blog). Good presentations of any kind take practice—whether performance, graphic, verbal, oral, or sartorial. And if you are gearing up to present in front of an important audience sometime in your life, you don't want (on one hand) to look like a rube who can't dress him/her self, or on the other hand like someone who is trying too hard. If you want it to look normal and easy, and if you don't want it to take twice the time of an ugly data-dump, you have to practice.

Home and Away

One of the defining moments in my pre-cartographic life was my first time in London (England) in 1983. I did a lot of wandering about, and had an old-fashioned Bartholomew’s map of the city (hand lettering and cross-hatching, spot colors, etc.). I took some longish walks exploring the city, and then would get out the map to see where I’d been. Because London is such an un-gridded city, I’d find myself approaching places I’d been before from new directions, and later, tracing my route on the map, I’d realize I’d sometimes been only a block or two from a previous day’s walk.

In this case, the map provided an obvious framework on which I “draped” my own experiences. I’ve found that for large-scale maps in general, this process of using the map as a common base for explorations makes places make sense—especially urban spaces (I’m not much of a wilderness walker).

To me this is central to what a map is good for, but it is of course only a small part of what maps do in the world: it only really happens using large-scale maps: maps of states and countries don’t have the sort of visual information that ties direct experiences together.

---

Every so often these days, I’ll find myself approaching a familiar place from an unfamiliar direction, and I find the jump from one to the other to be a sudden change in attitude. When i drive through unfamiliar places, I pay attention to the generic: interstate highway signage, billboards, franchise stores. It makes me a little sad to see this generic quality, when I am interested in seeing something new and different; it makes me think a little of John Steinbeck’s rants against growing uniformity and generic-ness 50 years ago in Travels With Charley.

On the other hand, I see the same signage, billboards and franchise stores in my own back yard, and they seem simultaneously normal (they’re always there) and locally rooted (they’re landmarks, and they employ or otherwise have to do with my neighbors). A Burger King on the corner near my office closed earlier this year, and while I won’t miss it as a place to get food or as a neighborhood social hub, it was a little disturbing to see the marker of the corner of 18th and Central change.

My point is, depending on whether I’m home or away, my responses to these generic landmarks change. When I’m in unfamiliar territory, they are the only things familiar to me. And in fact when I’m on the road, I tend to seek out specific generic national brands for the sake of being reasonably sure of what I’m getting. When I’m on familiar turf, these generic brands are just part of a familiar landscape more shaped by my past experience and those of friends.

---

Where am I going with this?

When I cross under an anonymous freeway bridge (and is there any other kind, really?), it makes a huge difference in my attitude if I can see in my mind’s eye that it’s a bridge I’ve crossed myself. It becomes a “home” experience. When it’s an unfamiliar road, all I see is the bridge; when it’s a familiar road, it becomes part of a mental map of the familiar.

I think of the experience of driving a new bypass on a formerly familiar route. The landmarks all look right, and then suddenly I’m seeing familiar places from the wrong angle, and then familiar places from elsewhere on my map, or features I’d never seen before.

This to me is where large-scale maps can be very useful. They let me make sense of new experiences like this, and ground them amongst my existing experience. I find it a kind of exciting thing to edit a map to show a new road alignment (call me weird) in part because it’s about a new experience of a familiar space.

But interestingly, those maps are themselves built of entirely generic graphic materials. So they can’t and don’t actually transmit local sense of place. They are all grammar and syntax, all the graphic equivalent of journalistic speech, without any sense of direct experience or personal lives lived. When I project my experience on them (as JB Harley did in his famous essay on an Ordnance Survey map of his former home town), I am essentially draping experience over a framework. This process is similar to the way I approach a new place via landmark, directional orientation, and street grid, and then build experience on top of that.

So what I think I am approaching here is a way of looking at maps that needs to incorporate more than the map itself. Studying cartography separate from experience, especially studying meaning and implicit content of maps, is like studying syntax and grammar and sentence structure without ever acknowledging one can be moved by literature.

Don't forget the primates

Just back from a week visiting my folks and my high school reunion. Nice bunch of people.

I spent a bunch of the day on Monday with my friend Nathan who was in my class in second and fifth grades and in high school and whose parents then moved to New Hampshire near where I lived for seven years. So we've kept in touch. He's doing interesting work in forestry now, and our conversation turned to his interest in restoring old-growth forests through management. This sounds utterly counter-intuitive if we're used to a wilderness-based way of thinking, but it echoes some other interesting reads recently.

My favorite book from last year is Charles Mann's 1491. And its most controversial claim seems to be that much of the Americas that we grew up thinking of as wilderness was in fact managed, just using very different techniques than Old-World-style agriculture. I gather it's controversial in part because some environmentalists think of this as an excuse to bulldoze the Amazon, and because it challenges the ideal of a human-free wilderness.

Nathan says he has a line he uses to try and get past the human/wilderness mind-block: "Don't forget the primates." Think of us as a species who has been an integral part of the ecosystem. Don't assume that the best way to restore a functioning ecosystem is to remove the homo sapiens. Seems obvious to me, but so much of our basic thinking about the environment in the modern western world is bifurcated: here's the boundary of the park, and on this side is people's land, on the other side is not-people's land (on this side of the line is the Euro-American land, and on that side (until my brother bilks you out of it) is the Amero-American land).

And so I go off on a variant riff of the "grid" conversation of a couple months ago. As I was arguing then, the trouble is not with the grid as a measure, or as a way of organizing information. The trouble is when the grid is used to impose lines back onto the land. This reimposed grid is a symptom of the same sort of disassociation with the landscape that posits "non-human" wilderness.