Some Thoughts on Jacques Bertin’s “[Carto]graphic Semiology”

I’ve been thinking about, and am about to return to the chapter on, the role of post-war academic cartographers and other geographers in developing ideas that would eventually engender sociocultural map studies. As one part of this, I have been reviewing the work of Jacques Bertin (1918–2010), and especially his Sémiologie graphique (1967). What surprised me, is that Bertin’s magnum opus seems to have actually been much less important than I have been led to believe in promoting a semiological approach to map studies. The latter is perhaps typified by Denis Wood and John Fels’ (1986) analysis of a modern road map. Superficially the two sets of work seem connected, and seem to be commonly yoked together in the literature, but they are actually quite distinct, if not contradictory.

Sémiologie graphique (1967) went through a second edition (1973) that was then translated into German as Graphische Semiologie (1974) and into English as The Semiology of Graphics (1983). A metrical study of the literature cited in the ICA’s International Yearbook of Cartography found that Sémiologie graphique, in all its editions, tied for the highest number of citations with the many editions of Robinson’s Elements of Cartography (Kanakubo and Morita 1993, 18–19; see Palsky 2019, 189). Yet it seems that Sémiologie graphique was not that important in the development of new approaches to mapping, beyond the undoubtedly important fundamental principle of “visual variable.”

Semiotics and Semiology

There is some room for confusion. Bertin used the French word for the study of signs, “sémiologie,” as advanced by Ferdinand de Saussure; however, his conception of signs was very much in line with the semiotics developed from the ideas of Charles Saunders Peirce. While properly distinct (Daylight 2014), the systems have similar elements by which scholars have tried to unify them (among many guides, see Chandler 2002). In Bertin’s case, Gilles Palsky (2019, 191) noted that because Bertin’s ideas explored the “relations between signs,” they therefore constituted a structural system like Saussure’s semiology.

Yet by “graphics” Bertin did not understand all imagery in general but specifically those networks, diagrams, and maps that together form the visual equivalent of mathematical notation. He thus construed “graphic representation” to be specifically monosemic, i.e., having just one meaning, a restrictive position that very much runs counter to semiology and its celebration of polysemy. In this respect, “graphics” possess a “double function as a storage mechanism and a research instrument” (Bertin 1983, 2; see MacEachren 1995, 229; Palsky 2019, 191). In other words, for Bertin, maps are both synoptic statements of geographical knowledge, as per the normative map concept, but also a means to explore data by visualizing them. Bertin’s goal was to ensure “efficient” communication: the greater the efficiency (speed of comprehension) with which a map is read correctly, the more optimal it is. His approach was syntactical, seeking to codify the construction of signs in a manner appropriate to the nature of the data they represent and in a manner that reveals connections between signs. He did not consider the semantics and pragmatics that a complete cartographic semiotics would properly entail (Ormeling 2015, 7). (Morita (2011) demonstrated that Bertin did embrace, in his later work, a fuller semiotics, but that later work was not adopted by academic cartographers.)

The importance of Bertin’s semiotics lay in his identification of “visual variables” (magnitude, shape, orientation, etc.) and their appropriate and inappropriate usages in creating graphics (Bertin 1983, 60–97). For example, the size of a sign on a map is intuitively read by percipients as relating to the size of the feature mapped, so that the size of signs should only be varied to indicate ordinal or scaled change in the feature; shape is read as relating to quality or type, so differently shaped signs should be used to map features of different types. Bertin’s ideas were not well-received at first (Ormeling 2015, 7; also Head 1991, 239; MacEachren 1995, 271), but they did gain traction among academic cartographers. Finding them to be incomplete, academic cartographers have worked to refine them and to apply them further to tactile, animated, and aural mapping as well as static, visual mapping (Head 1991, 241–47; MacEachren 1994, 16; MacEachren 1995, 270–90; Jégou 2019).

Bertin’s ideas proved especially important in the shift of map design studies towards mapping as geovisualization (Palsky 2012), especially as the Anglo-American style of psychophysical and behavioralist design studies was increasingly rejected in the 1980s. Construed as using “the map’s power to explore, analyze and visualize spatial datasets to understand patterns better” (Crampton 2001, 235), geovisualization appears as a tightening of the circuit of circulation until the map creator is also the map percipient, effectively reasserting the cartographer’s control over the map reader who has been turned into a non-professional map user. Much of the effort of academic cartographers has gone into the design of adaptive systems that can be tailored to the needs of the individuals using those systems to make maps but at the same time constraining their design options.

Yet, even here, the influence of Sémiologie graphique seems to have been less than commonly presumed. To judge from the essays collected by Francis Harvey (2019) in a special issue of Cartography and Geographical Information Science to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s first publication, Bertin’s (1981 [1977]) manual of graphic information processing was actually more important in guiding the move to geovisualization.

Sémiologie graphique thus appears very much as an isolated period piece, without much significance for the international development of cartography.

References

Bertin, Jacques. 1967. Sémiologie graphique: Les diagrammes, les réseaux, les cartes. Paris: Editions Gauthier-Villars.

——— 1981 [1977]. Graphics and Graphic Information–Processing. Trans. William J. Berg and Paul Scott. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Originally published as La graphique et le traitement graphique de l’information (Paris : Flammarion, 1977).

———. 1983. Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps. Trans. William J. Berg. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Reprinted Redlands, Calif.: ESRI Press, 2011.

Chandler, Daniel. 2002. Semiotics: The Basics. London: Routledge.

Crampton, Jeremy W. 2001. “Maps as Social Constructions: Power, Communication and Visualization.” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 2: 235–52.

Daylight, Russell. 2014. “The Difference between Semiotics and Semiology.” Gramma Journal of Theory and Criticism 20: 37–50.

Harvey, Francis. 2019. “Jacques Bertin’s Legacy and Continuing Impact for Cartography.” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 46, no. 2: 97–99.

Head, C. Grant. 1991. “Mapping as Language or Semiotic System: Review and Comment.” In Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space, ed. David M. Mark and Andre U. Frank, 237–62. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

Jégou, Laurent. 2019. “Expanding the Sémiologie Graphique for Contemporary Cartography: Some Ideas from Visual Semiotics, Art History and Design.” Cartography & Geographic Information Science 46, no. 2: 182–88.

Kanakubo, Tositomo, and Takashi Morita. 1993. “Introduction: The Selected Main Theoretical Issues Facing Cartography (ICA Report).” Cartographica 30, no. 4: ix–x, 14–20.

MacEachren, Alan M. 1994. SOME Truth with Maps: A Primer on Symbolization & Design. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers.

———. 1995. How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design. New York: Guilford Press.

Morita, Takashi. 2011. “Reflections on the Works of Jacques Bertin: From Sign Theory to Cartographic Discourse.” Cartographic Journal 48, no. 2: 86–91.

Ormeling, Ferjan. 2015. “Academic Cartography in Europe.” In Cartography in the Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Monmonier, 6–13. Vol. 6 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Palsky, Gilles. 2012. “Map design vs sémiologie graphique: Réflexions sur deux courants de la cartographie théorique.” Bulletin du Comité français de cartographie 212: 7–12.

———. 2019. “Jacques Bertin, from Classical Training to Systematic Thinking of Graphic Signs.” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 46, no. 2: 189–93.

Wood, Denis, and John Fels. 1986. “Designs on Signs: Myth and Meaning in Maps.” Cartographica 23, no. 3: 54–103.