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the Power of Maps, page 27). Around that time, maps became significant navigational and military aids and powerful tools for cities, states, and nations to help organize boundaries and administrative activities. These maps started to outline and actually define states and other political boundaries. Woods writes, “the map possessed an all but unique power to give the elusive idea of the state concrete form, to those outside looking in, certainly, but also to those living within.” This idea that maps have the power to literally define the world around us, and not just represent it, still holds true today and is in your hands as a map maker.

It is important to keep in mind that while maps are driven by data that has been collected, often from observed data, maps are not inherently objective artifacts. A common perception of a map is that it is a neutral display of collected data, similar to a spreadsheet. But there are many questions when looking at a spreadsheet or a map: How accurate is the data? How was the data collected? What data is not presented? These issues show the subjectivity of maps.

Maps are akin to statistics. This definition of statistics from Wikipedia could apply to mapmaking: “Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data.” In statistics, data gets collected, aggregated, and then put through various mathematical algorithms to either prove or disprove a hypothesis, usually around some preexisting idea about the world. Statistics can easily be misused by applying specific methodologies to ensure a certain analytical outcome. In the same way, a mapmaker collects and combines a huge amount of data, simplifies and codifies it, and then presents it on paper or a computer screen so as to assert some specific idea. Depending on the decisions made throughout the process, that idea can be conveyed in many ways.

Maps are art. “Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items (often with symbolic significance) in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect” (Wikipedia). Once data has been collected for a map, there are still many decisions to be made on how to visually communicate that data on a map, such as symbols, colors, interactions, or annotations. How does one symbolize a church? What color is a county road? Where will the legend be? With maps, as with art, every decision, no matter how small, is often intentional, so to convey a very specific vision to the viewer. In these decisions is the power to communicate with maps.

Story Telling

Maps tell a story. Users expect a map to communicate an idea to them. This could be a story about how there are over a billion people that live on less than a dollar a day (see Figure 1-1). Or the story could be more complex, describing the rise, climax, and decline of newspapers in the United States over the past 300 years; this story was told in the interactive map by Standford’s Rural West Initiative.

Figure 1-1. Percentage of population living on less than a dollar a day (2007–2008) from Wikipedia

With any kind of story telling, the more detailed and interactive you can be, the more likely you will be to keep your audience captivated. What colors should you use? What font should the street names be in? How should you use instructions and legends to teach people to interact with the map? What happens when a user clicks on a marker on the map? These decisions lead your users to the end of your story.

The Persuasion

Through a cartographer’s choices of selection, omission, or simplification, a map can be manipulated to illustrate entirely different human circumstances in the same physical geography.

-- John Brian Harley, map historian, 1989

Maps try to convince you that something is somewhere. The something could be physical like a tree or river, or it could be a territory, such as the State of California, or it could be a mere notion, like the idea that California is a Democratic state. The somewhere could be any place, but it is only useful if it is