Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
globes, for example, is central to their success in rhetorical communication and means they
are widely deployed as persuasive devices to present ideas, themes and concepts that are
difficult to express verbally, as well as serving as decorative objects. The result, according
to Francaviglia (1999, p. 155), is that '[c]artographers draw maps that have the power to
both inform and beguile their users'. Most of the geographic visualization encountered on a
daily basis (often with little conscious thought given to them) are maps used in the service
of persuasion, ranging from the corporate marketing map to the more subtle displays such
as states' claims to sovereign power over territory, implicitly displayed in the daily weather
map seen on the news (Monmonier, 1996).
The production of geographic visualization involves a whole series of decisions, from the
initial selection of what is to be measured, to the choice of the most appropriate scale of
representation and projection, and the best visual symbology to use. The notion of 'visu-
alization as decision process' is useful methodologically because it encourages particular
ways of organized thinking about how to generalize reality, how to distil inherent, mean-
ingful spatial structure from the data, and how to show significant relationships between
things in a legible fashion. Geographic visualization provides a means to organize large
amounts of, often multi-dimensional, information about a place in such a fashion as to
facilitate human exploration and understanding. Yet, visualization practices are not just
a set of techniques for information 'management'; they also encompass important social
processes of knowledge construction. As scholars have come to realize, vision and culture
are intimately entwined and inseparable (Pickles, 2004). Geographic visualization then is
both a practical form of information processing and also a compelling form of rhetorical
communication.
It must be recognized that geographic visualization is a process of creating, rather than
revealing, spatial knowledge. Throughout the process of visualization creation a large num-
ber of subjective, often unconscious, decisions are made about what to include and, possibly
more importantly, what to exclude, how the visualization will look, and what message the
designer is seeking to communicate. In this fashion, geographic visualization necessarily
becomes imbued with the social norms and cultural values of the people who construct
them.
While contemporary geographic visualization developments, such as Google Earth and
other online virtual globes (see Chapter 2), can be seen as a logical and even 'natural'
evolution of 'flat' map representations, whose aim is to enhance users' knowledge of new
spaces, making navigation and commerce more efficient and increasing the 'return-on-
investment' in existing geospatial data by facilitating wider distribution on the Web, we
would argue that the situation with geographic visualization is also more contestable.
Only certain geographic visualizations get made and they show only certain aspects, in
certain ways. They are not inherently 'good' and will certainly not be beneficial to all
users. The visualization of geographic space is not a benign act, instead particular visu-
alizations are made to serve certain interests. These interests may reflect dominant power
relations in the society, especially when individuals and institutions with power commis-
sion a great deal of geographic visualization and control access to underlying data re-
sources. Thus geographic visualizations are not objective, neutral artefacts but a political
view point onto the world (Monmonier, 1996; Pickles, 2004). The prospect of propaganda
and deceptive manipulation with geographic visualization always at times may rear its ugly
head.
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