Exercises in Cartography - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 19

Fig. 2.4 Diagram map following the Aim´ Perpillou method (From Claval and Wieber ( 1969 ))
Fig. 2.5 Map exercise to assess the accessibility of urban services; the cumulative number of arcs
it takes to get from each corner point to all public facilities is used as input for an accessibility
isoline map (From Basic Cartography Exercise Manual (1991))
Apart from map construction exercises, the geographers in our faculty also had
to do map use exercises, for analytical purposes, and these existed for instance of
assessing accessibility, nearest neighbour values or quantifying patterns and shapes
(see Fig. 2.5 , for instance).
What is especially significant in doing most of these exercises is that the students
see the effects of their design decisions by comparing their results with those of
their colleagues and perceive how these differences affect or boost the information
transfer: which method is best, pie graphs or columns to render absolute statistical
values? Is it better to render the absolute values of the data or to link them to other
data, so as to normalize them? (See Fig. 2.6 ). In a dot map exercise, where a base
map and a description of the residential housing characteristics for a campus would
be provided and the students asked to work out the best representative value and
size of the dots with which to render the population distribution pattern, again
comparing the results always was as much of an eye-opener to the students as doing
the exercise themselves.