The new cartography of Google Maps

There's already a lot of comment on the interwebs about the new Google maps redesign. Here's a few of my own thoughts...

I like the new design. Yes, it shares many design cues from Apple's own maps but at least Google have the content to back it up. With so many players in the map-making market, maps will always begin to morph to what fashion is dictating. Why would any company make a map that jolts its users (customers) too much? The fashion is for clean, simple, uncluttered cartography with soft colours and minimalist symbology. Hmm...they are all basic cartographic principles; it's amazing it's taken so many companies this long to figure it out!

The big news is that Google have been the first to jump with their move towards personalized cartography. A map on your device that knows who you are, what you like and populates it accordingly. Based on all of the lovely personal details it captures on your movement, shopping habits, searches and who knows what else your map will show what you want, where you want it. The map will no doubt contain basic features but the thematic content will change. My map will no doubt show every football stadium (but I bet it shows American football stadiums in the US rather than soccer) and based on my recent needs, painters and decorators. So it'll be useless to me. Maps have always been based on decisions made by a cartographer and to an extent they all suffer in the sense that they are disconnected from the person who uses it. However, we used to have different maps for different purposes, designed for that purpose. Now we have one map, designed to cover every eventuality. It's impossible to make that work for everyone so the idea of tailoring it to individuals is at first sight a good one. But...what role does that leave for the cartographer? Maps now based on algorithms from searches doesn't strike me as the best way to make sensible choices about what to include and exclude on a map...because most people will make highly subjective choices; and most people's mental maps of the world, manifest through the stored searches and habits that Google will now use to build that picture, are actually pretty poor.

That is why cartography is important. The role of the cartographer is to figure things out to make a map that suits a purpose. Left to machines that build individual maps is potentially going to leave us with so many poor maps of the world it'll end up being impossible to make any sense of it. I'm due to visit Dresden, Germany, later in the year for the International Cartographic Conference. Do I really want the map to show me all the things that I use routinely around my home town? No...I use places differently. I will not want to know where the painters and decorators are. I want to see a map made by a cartographer for someone to use AS a search tool, rather than present the results of aspatial searches transposed to a new space altogether. I want to be able to explore; possibly serendipitously. I want the map to guide me, yes, but I want to be able to discover things that perhaps I never even knew about or had the knowledge or foresight to have somehow imbued my Google profile with ahead of my visit.

Where will borders be placed? Where I want them or where I perceive they exist? Will I see Starbucks everywhere (as one of my colleagues mentioned) or will I see small local independent coffee shops that might expand my coffee universe? Do I want to be constrained to my view of the world or do I want to see the world? Ultimately, I know where I live better than Google. My mental map is accurate already and I don't need it to go through Google's filters to make me that map. Elsewhere? I want to see that place objectively, not through some homogenized filter that makes it look like everywhere else I know. For that I'll consult a reputable, authoritative map made by a cartographer or company I trust to do the job properly.

Maps have always had the potential to lie and its true there are many poor maps that just don't support any meaningful use. But isn't that the problem? For many years maps have slowly become mainstream and lacked cartographic control or input. But rather than try to fix the problem by giving each of us our own narrow view of the world that will simply serve to narrow our outlook even further, why not just work harder to make good maps.

So the map is made for me is it? Well, I'm a cartographer and I can tell you now...the map Google is going to serve for me will not contain what I want. I don't want it based on how I use their other services. I certainly don't want it populated with ads. Let's not forget that Google are an advertising company and realizing that maps are a great way of getting stuff in front of people is their ticket to sales and revenue.

The landscape is changing rapidly and I admire Google for giving this a go. If it weren't for what they released on February 8th 2005 we'd not have seen such ground-breaking change and such a mapping revolution. This may well be another case of disruptive change that pays off (for them) but I'm not yet convinced. Democratized cartography is one thing but there's an old adage about people not knowing what is good for them so basing a map on only what people have shared about themselves consciously or unwittingly is fraught with potential pitfalls. I support good cartography and maps made by people who know what they are doing. Yes, some are bad and some lie but having millions of different maps that all lie in multifarious ways doesn't seem to me to solve any cartographic problem. It seems to me to be mapping for the lowest common denominator. Google have gone from a one map fits all approach to mapping for individuals. I'm of the view that somewhere in the middle is about right...and that's the art of cartography!

Slip, slide, pan and zoom...web map interactivity

I've just finished creating a dasymetric dot density map of the 2012 Presidential election results. It's available as an interactive multiscale web map on ArcGIS Online that goes from 1:18m (where 1 dot = 1000 votes) to 1:36k (1 dot = 10 votes) which can be seen below:

 

I also made a 1:1,000,000 version of the large scale data showing 35 million dots for a huge wall map so I thought I'd use Microsoft's ZoomIt to create, well, a zoomed version which is here:

And the version at HugePic presents the work in much the same way (though you can get metrics there). The interesting thing here is the different types of useability. For the multiscale web map, each zoom level shows re-classified data so you get incrementally more dots as you move through the scales and you can click on the map to reveal data; but of course you don't ever get the impact of all the data at once. Conversely, the large wall map sacrifices some of the background detail but you can see the data at once (when it's on the wall). Every dot on a singel map but the zoomIt controls still allow you some element of interactivity to slip and slide across and within the map. If you have a view on which approach you prefer, add a comment and let me know.

iMapPrint

No. Seriously? Come on...you're having a laugh? Apple has filed a patent for a printing invention that prints maps reports  AppleInsider.  Hot on the heels of their other ludicrous map-related patents (remember schematic maps), Apple have come up with a beauty here.

The invention "calls for a device to print out directions based on a request to do so, laying out a map overview and distinct steps along the route for easier navigation.". If I'm not mistaken there may very well be prior art for this one...you make a map, then print it. But wait, they claim that one of the reasons this is novel is that "Printouts provided by existing devices... are often cluttered or poorly laid out, and can be confusing". Well I can't argue with that one but that's really just down to a lack of ability on the part of the person who makes the map, sometime aided and abetted by less than friendly software...which is where templates come in (yes, map templates...we've had those for years too, and you can print them).

Now admittedly, 19th Century Marshall Island navigational stick charts were never printed on paper but then again, paper (which became easily available in the 1400s) would get wet and it's doubtful that they had access to a Gutenberg printing press. So what are Apple proposing...some mini printer attached to the top of an iPhone 6? a new device (iMapPrint)? or perhaps the fabled iWatch will make a fanfare entrance with this new functionality but wait...oh...they've been beaten to it!

Witness the 1927 Plus Four Wristlet Route Indicator...

An antediluvian wrist map device for navigating with a clunky, unmemorable and artless name which even sounds like the name of a modern GPS device (though the iPlusFourWristletRouteIndicator has a ring to it). The idea was simple: the Wooster-esque motorist would putter around England, scrolling a tiny paper map loaded in his wrist as he went with two black knobs. Want a different route?... you simple slide out one map and insert another one and off you go!

And possibly the bigger question raised with this iPrinting maps stuff is, well, how do I put it...isn't print mapping dead? Or maybe that's the genius of Apple...make devices that do away with paper (and vinyl, and CDs and books and...) then reinvent the lot, ride on the wave of nostalgia and charge people for all the crap they got rid of years ago!

I look forward to the new iAtlas of the World, possibly the iTheatrum Orbis Terrarum might be a good starting point.

Some gun crime maps

Would it be acceptable to call The Guardian's US Gun Crime Map a bit of a crime against mapping itself?

Good things about this map:

• Easily and rapidly produced with free tools...quick to make, quick to disseminate
• Data has been properly manipulated so it's reported per capita
• The popups reveal some useful information with good comparisons

Bad things about this map:

• Easily and rapidly produced with free tools...the author just hasn't spent any time thinking about how to represent the data effectively
• State boundary overlay data has quite horrible mismatching boundaries and is grossly misshapen around the Great Lakes for instance
• Choice of colour is poor for a choropleth...single hue sequential would be more useful
• Legend suggests overlapping classes. Clearly data can only belong to one but the legend causes confusion.
• Is a single integer really sufficient...the data is reported to two decimal places.
• Basemap labels are overprinted. Just a function of a third party basemap service not being modified but...play around with transparency and add labels as an additional overlay.
• No need for the map to be multiscale. You get no additional or finer grained data if you zoom in. Limit the scales or disable the zoom.
• Popups often open outside the map frame
• It's Web Mercator...not an equal area projection so sizes of areas are distorted across the map which makes the northern States appear larger than they are in relative terms.

Given the above, the following static map presents the same information far more effectively and avoids many of the problems I've identified.

Don't get me wrong...this isn't about avoiding web maps and reverting to static. It's about making the right choices for the data you're trying to map. In this case, the person who made the static version has thought about how to make the map. We can see the actual values so there's no need for a legend. The patterns of "more" and "less" are more easily seen. Areas are preserved through the use of a conic projection. Labels are on top and there's no background clutter. We're not diverted by interactivity that doesn't reveal anything. I'd probably not use red in the title and the State abbreviations are not going to be understood by most outside the USA.

Bloomberg Businessweek also went for a static version and used the map to make a comment about comparisons with international murder rates.

OK, they have an overlapping class (at 2.8) but the data hasn't been horribly rounded to a single integer. What works well about this map is the comparison. Without comparisons the story is flat. While we can say one state has a higher rate than another the data is given an extra dimension by being compared to international rates.

As an example of a terrific web map on the same subject, Gun homicides in America by Jerome Cukier is everything The Guardian's example isn't.

It's not the same data (it's 2010) but it shows what you can do using web technologies (in this case d3 used to great effect) to add value to the map.  The web page itself provides access to all the detail. The map leads the page and shows finer resolution data but it's a single dataset so it's presented at one scale. No need for pan or zoom. It's time-enabled and shows the cumulative pattern of murders during the year. Each murder flashes on the map and the greyscale pattern builds to show the overall pattern of quantity and location. This helps the reader find a location and also see patterns build. The map can show totals because each hexagon is the same size so visual comparisons across the map are preserved. Graphically clean and efficient; the functionality is intuitive and the data presented in tabular form below the map avoids some of the problems of trying to fit too much into a map-driven popup. The data can be sorted by field and filtered by clicking the map. A crosshair highlights a line in the table when clicked. A neat map, cleverly thought-through and expertly produced.

Of course, coding the map means you need to know how to but just look at what Jerome has been able to produce by comparison to The Guardian! Of course, The Guardian could have done a much better job using their approach so it's unfair to suggest the two are miles apart on the basis of a different authoring approach alone.

In summary...

Knowing something about the academics of cartography doesn't mean you need to be academic but being cogniscant of the craft helps identify what to show and how. Knowing something about manipulative cartography also helps; by this I mean being masterful with your chosen technology. Couple this with a creative approach to representing data and you complete the equation. Whether you're going for static or interactive, getting it right is a combination of these skills and mindsets. The Guardian examples shows what happens when you get it horribly wrong. I see it as lazy mapping...just because it's easy to do doesn't mean you should do it. Taking time to understand what you're doing and crafting your map; making the best of what's at your disposal and making a high quality product simply gets far better and more purposeful results.