Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Waldseemüller globe gore from 1507. From the University of Minnesota James Ford Bell library. Reprinted by
permission.
In-Depth
Representation
An artist may represent a face, a room, or a landscape. A computer scientist
may represent the same things and events as a data model or a database. A
geographer may represent these things as objects and as relationships. A car-
tographer may represent them as features and attributes.
For some people, representations have dangerously replaced experience.
On the other end of the spectrum, other people find that our enhanced tech-
nologies for representation make it possible to transcend past limitations. We
can talk to people all over the world, they may point out, but others ask, For
what good? This is not the place to engage these discussions, but before getting
into more specifics about representation, it's good to have some notion of how
the term
representation
is used.
All these forms of artistic, computer, geographic, and cartographic repre-
sentation are important to how we make sense of the world around us, but our
vocabulary is a bit weak for distinguishing between them. To help with this
problem, this topic always proceeds “representation” with an adjective to dis-
tinguish what kind of representation is meant—for example,
geographic represen-
tation
.
Review Questions
1. What distinguishes a
thing
from an
event
?
2. What is the geographic significance of the difference between a
thing
and an
event
?
3. How are things represented in cartography?
4. What influences the quality of GI or a map?
5. Is every map reliable enough for every use?
6. How do representation and communication relate to each other?
Search WWH ::
Custom Search