Exercises in Cartography - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 17

Fig. 2.2 Producing a panorama from a topographic map

the´matique comme me´thode de recherche , by Claval andWieber ( 1969 ), which finally
presented some intellectual challenge. It contained statistics on point, linear or areal
data and base maps on which these data had to be visualized. Here at least there also
was an opportunity to apply one's geographical knowledge, as doing these exercises
frequently called for judgment regarding what was most important from a geographi-
cal point of view. As an example, in Fig. 2.3 , I show an assignment to map statistical
data on agriculture for Indonesia, where one has to pick the most important aspect of
the table (based on one's geographical knowledge of the country) and visualize it.
The textbook by Claval and Wieber also showed us that—at least within Europe—
there were different schools of cartographic design, using different mapping
techniques. For instance, in France in the 1970s the areal cartogram method devised
by Aim´ Perpillou was en vogue. This was a quite elaborate method of showing
different percentages of land use, per enumeration unit, by using coloured bands that
together made up 100%(Fig. 2.4 ). Themethod called for extreme generalization of the
data and the resulting images were not altogether straightforward. This method was
never used inGermany or in the UnitedKingdom. InGermany, isoline maps were only
used for physical phenomena, and the United Kingdom was an early advocate of
anamorphosis maps, which were rather frowned upon in Germany. And it was only in
Czechoslovakia that a particular time-related diagram type ever occurred.

2.3 ICA's Basic Cartography Programme

In the 1970s, there was already an ICA project under way to produce a textbook for
cartographers. This endeavour was supported byUNESCO, and it resulted in the Basic
Cartography manual series (Anson and Ormeling, 1984-2002 ), containing three