Cartographic Perspectives

Review of Metadata for Digital Collections: A How-To-Do-It Manual, Second Edition

Kate Thornhill — 2023-04-18

Review of Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Cartography of the Americas

Jörn Seemann — 2023-08-01

Review of Phenomena: Doppelmayr’s Celestial Atlas

Veronica Penney — 2023-08-28

Review of A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps

Glenn O. Humphress — 2023-09-18

Drawing Maine: The Pictorial Maps of the Phillips Brothers

Benjamin Meader — 2023-12-21

Tracing the Development of the General Land Office’s “National Map”

Jenny Marie Johnson — 2023-07-06

From the foundation of the republic, the government of the United States promoted western expansion through the surveying and sales of the public domain. The agency responsible over most of this period, the General Land Office (GLO), produced maps of the progress of surveying and sales on an annual basis. This article reviews a notable series, from the first “connected” map (i.e., one showing all the public lands in a single view) in 1864 until the last in 1953. In each period, the national map produced by the agency reflects the concerns of the time, as it records the preparations for the sale of the public domain for settlement. In the first decades of the connected maps, the primary thematic elements documented the work of GLO in surveying what is now called the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). These maps evolved to include a treatment of “territorial acquisitions,” which eventually became the most prominent thematic element, while still including a representation of the PLSS grid. The series’ first depictions of territorial acquisitions included an exceptional error, one of several, indicating that the Oregon Country was part of the Louisiana Purchase. Commissioner Binger Hermann expounded his understanding of the United States’ territorial history in an eighty-seven page monograph, an unusual recognition of a cartographic error, which led to corrections. The long history of this map series provides material to understand the role of maps in the history of the country.

Cognitively Congruent Color Palettes for Mapping Spatial Emotional Data. Matching Colors to Emotions.

Andrei Kushkin — 2023-12-14

Emotions are touchstones of humans’ everyday life experiences. Maps of emotions inform a variety of research from urban planning and disaster response to marketing studies. Emotions are most often shown on maps with colors. Previous research suggests that humans have subjective associations between colors and emotions that impact objective task performance. Thus, a mismatch between the emotion associated with a color and the emotion it represents may bias the viewer’s attention, perception, and understanding of the map. There are no guidelines that can help cartographers and designers choose matching colors to display spatial emotional data. This study aimed to address this gap by suggesting cognitively congruent color palettes—color sets matched to emotions in a way that is aligned with color-emotion associations.

To obtain the set of candidate congruent colors and identify appropriate color-to-emotion assignments, two user experiments were conducted with participants in the United States. In the first, participants picked a representative color for 23 discrete emotions. In the second experiment, for each candidate color from a set derived from the results of the first experiment, participants selected the best-matching emotions. The probability of the emotion being selected served as a measure of how representative the color is of that emotion. Due to the many-to-many nature of associations between colors and emotions, suitable color choices were incorporated into a dynamic palette generation tool. This tool solves the color assignment problem and produces a suitable color palette depending on the combination of selected emotions.

Instructions to Authors

Author Instructions — 2024-01-29

Quantity Over Quality? Teaching Cartography Through the 30 Day Map Challenge

Carl Sack — 2023-10-24

I used the 30 Day Map Challenge as a framework to structure my Spring 2023 Cartography and Visualization community college course. Students were tasked with a new mapping assignment following the themes of the Map Challenge to complete during each class meeting throughout the semester, as an alternative to a more traditional project-based lab structure. I sequenced lecture topics to accompany and elucidate the Map Challenge prompts, and used Socratic prompts on Google Jamboard slides to spur collaborative class discussions. As a whole, the ten-student class completed 80% of submissions for 27 required mapping prompts, submitting a total of 218 maps that fulfilled the prompts. Short, thematic mapping activities entailed greater repetition of software workflows as well as more opportunities for independent problem solving.

About the Cover

Alison DeGraff Ollivierre — 2024-01-29

Masthead

Daniel P. Huffman — 2024-01-29

Letter from the Editor

Jim Thatcher — 2024-01-29