Just because you can map something, doesn’t mean it actually exists. The map is not the same as the terrain being mapped, and mistaking one for the other can quickly lead you to big trouble.

We are not mapping bigfoot, what we are actually mapping is population distribution, modified by wilderness coverage, and perhaps with a strong influence of the social and psycholgical propensity of people in different areas to believe in bigfoot. We are mapping an interaction of real parameters, not any single real parameter.

Even if Sasquatch does exist, this map won’t help you find him. Maps, like statistics, are an invaluable tool, but they are only an aid to analysis, not a substitute for it. And once again, analysis is a psychological activity, one heavily influenced by preconceptions, peer pressure, custom, funding, politics, a whole host of factors.

Maps are useful perceptual tools because the human eye and mind are capable of seeing real patterns that are difficult to perceive or understand in other forms, such as statistical, tabular or computational. The eye/brain is optimized to notice anomalies, because in nature, anomalies often indicate hidden threats or opportunities. But the price we pay for this increased sensitivity is lots of false patterns, signifying nothing.

In the past, the physical limitations inherent in compiling maps; data collection and procesing, visual display, drafting, publishing, and distribution, forced cartographers to be very suspicious of false patterns, and they were indoctrinated to keep their thematic maps as simple as possible to avoid that subjectivity, as well as make them easier and cheaper to produce quickly.

Today, when the selection, display and enhancement, emphasis and distibution of mapped themes and relationships can be controlled instantly with a mouse or a slider, then quickly erased if unsuitable, make it is a lot easier to force a map to say just about anything we want it to. It can then be electronically transmited to mislead millions. We can fool the eye/mind weaknesses, rather than exploit its strengths. I see this all the time now with partisan political maps. The most insidious examples of this subjectivity are not when it is done as a deliberate fraud from an unscrupulous mapmaker, but when it it originates subconsciouly from a cartographer’s own biases and prejudices, even when he is making a sincere effort to be objective. We fool ourselve more easily than we can fool others.

As a professional mapmaker, I was often pressured to change the map when its graphical results did not reflect the preconceptions of those who commissioned it. And it was not always easy to resist this pressure, particularly when one is well aware of one’s own biases and professional shortcomings. I’m not implying fraud, it is just inevitable. And to be fair to my masters, I can’t guarantee I didn’t do it myself.

I’m not criticizing this study. It just provoked a lot of these reflections based on my own experiences. It is my opinion that these sorts of concerns cannot be properly taught to geographers, they must insinuate themselve with experience. And today, when the training of cartographers is primarily concerned with exploiting and mastering constantly improving technical tools, it is not being properly communicated to practitioners in the field. They’re all too busy learning the new version of the GIS software.

These issues are not only a concern with thematic maps of subjective political or economic relationships, I can think of several examples from the life-and-death arena of pure “objective” physical geography: particularly, navigational charts. If anyone is interested and would like to hear about it, let me know, and I will be glad to follow up with another post on that specific topic.