Conclusion: Another geography - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 282

database driven geographic information systems. 2 The best instrument we possess
through which to acquire and assemble such information is our visual processing
ability through which our imaginations can work to construct knowledge. 3
When computers were first introduced to social scientists a contradictory
position was often held. The computer would soon be able to comprehend the
world, to see it. The machines could then tell us what was going on. Only later did
it ironically become obvious just how powerful our own human visual perception
is and how difficult it is to get a computer to mimic vision.
Writers in the past have thought of, and asked for, ideas that have been
brought to a rudimentary level of fruition here - a new look at cartography, more
productive employment of graphics, harnessing the machine's power and the
mind's intelligence. 4 It is hoped that this topic goes a little way in showing how
to achieve many of those wishes (Bunge, 1975; Angel and Hyman, 1972; Pred,
1984). The writings and drawings of a great many authors were consulted to try
to ensure that no substantial contributions made prior to 1991 were overlooked.
Many will have been overlooked that were made since, but as the popularity
of using data in social science fell so quickly after 1990, so too the number of
overlooked contributions will have been lower than would otherwise have been
the case.
The production of new forms of, and uses for, area cartograms is one novel
contribution of this topic and most of those included here have not been put in
print before now. Others look a little like a very rudimentary form of the new
types of cartograms that are now more widely available. Those used here were
developed with function foremost in mind (Figure 10.2). These took the longest
time to create and the algorithm was not easy to develop. Its implementation was
actually achieved using computer graphic techniques (Figures 10.3 and 10.4).
The dissertation from which this topic is derived was one of the first to
work visually with social information of such magnitude and detail, overcoming
many of the problems often said to make the handling of so much information
2 Early on it was realised that geographic information systems would only answer simple ques-
tions, not help us think about more complex problems, as maps can: 'A computer bank would
probably be more geared to answering some specific question ad hoc and perhaps less to provoking
thought about what questions should be answered' (Bickmore, 1975, p. 344).
3 'For the human imagination, always too limited, always curbed by socio-cultural contexts,
map collections present possibilities as vast as the data bank is large. Visual selection is faster and
better than any automatic selection, since it permits from the outset a variety of nuances beyond
the capability of any computer. But its costs in terms of time only pays off with “seeing maps.”
“Reading maps” make the operation impossible' (Bertin, 1981, p. 161).
4 Using faces to allow people to see patterns in data was especially ironic: 'This approach is an
amusing reversal of a common one in artificial intelligence. Instead of using machines to discriminate
between human faces by reducing them to numbers, we discriminate between numbers by using the
machine to do the brute labor of drawing faces and leaving the intelligence to the humans, who are
still more flexible and clever' (Chernoff, 1973, pp. 365 - 366).