Reworking the Founding Disciplinary Narrative along Cognitive Lines

Another piece that delved too deeply for the book ms …

And just as a reminder: what many call “thematic maps”—a term so loose in its usage that it is effectively useless—I call analytical maps. See blog post.

Robinson’s Disciplinary History

Arthur H. Robinson (1915–2004) was a graduate student at Ohio State University when the USA entered World War II in 1941. Richard Hartshorne, at UW­–Madison, was tipped to become head of a geography section being formed within a new Office of Strategic Services; en route to DC, he stopped off in Columbus and, enquiring about likely people who made maps, was led to Robinson, whom he promptly recruited to create and lead the OSS’s Map Division (1941–46); he ended the war as an army major (Martin 2005; Crampton 2011, 2014).

Promptly hired by UW–Madison, Robinson quickly wrote a new doctoral dissertation from scratch, focused on explaining the need for a new academic discipline of cartography focused on what he called “special” maps (Robinson 1947; published as Robinson, 1952, #4671). To sustain this argument, Robinson proposed a very specific narrative of the history of cartography that differed significantly from those already proposed by traditional map historians (historians of geography, historians, librarians, dealers and collectors of antiquarian maps) and internal map historians (map professionals and academics, including surveyors). As he wrote in the dissertation, he came away from his wartime service “acutely aware of the limitations of conventional presentation techniques” and the need to adopt alternative strategies of graphic design:

the creation of specialty maps (maps for specific presentations) was as much a problem in design as it was a problem in substantive research, and that the artist and commercial art were better fitted to solve the design problem than was the conventionally trained cartographer. Unfortunately bases for the evaluation of the visual presentation techniques were either lacking or if existing, were so aimed at specific undertakings, such as advertising, as to be essentially unusable by the cartographer. (Robinson 1947, vii)

(It is worth remembering that Robinson’s own training in map making was largely ad hoc and grounded more in his personal artistic skill with pen and ink; see Robinson 1970).

Robinson explained and sustained his argument for a new discipline by presenting a new narrative of the profession of cartography as an applied endeavor. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Robinson stated, cartography had comprised solely the practice of producing what he called “substantive” maps. Substantive mapping had continued to develop and improve, most recently through the many innovations, especially aerial photography, implemented during the recent war. But then, the emergent natural and social sciences had begun to make analytical maps (commonly known as thematic maps) and maps for presentation, all of which Robinson called “specialty” maps [n1]:

The story of the development of cartography from its beginnings is essentially a composite of the chronicles of exploration and survey, together with such abstruse material as the mathematics of map projections. Until recently the use of maps was largely limited to specialists such as navigators, surveyors, military planners and the like, and the preparation of their maps constituted a problem only with respect to the accuracy of the things mapped.…

Only in the last few centuries have really major advances occurred in cartographic technique. The majority of these advances, such as the iso-line, the graduated circle, and the hachure, have come about because of the ever-present and fundamental problem of presenting quantitative facts. Accuracy is obviously the first objective of any scientific activity; but when presentations of factual materials become widely used, the manner of presentation becomes of primary significance. (Robinson 1952, 7–8)

Specialty mapping remained uncodified and rooted in “convention, whim, and…ill-founded judgment,” his new agenda of design studies based in psychology and undertaken in properly institutionalized centers of national excellence would amount, he suggested, to a modern cartographic “revolution” as profound as that of the Renaissance (Robinson 1947,  vii, 10 (quotation), 1952, viii, 13). This simple narrative—little encumbered by hard evidence, beyond the fact that analytical mapping flourished after 1835 (Robinson 1955)—became something of a mainstay of the field as a whole, and not just the Anglophone portion (see Imhof 1963, 16; Morrison 1974; Kanakubo 1990; Azócar Fernández and Buchroithner 2014, 5–6).

That this historical argument was motivated by academic politics is perhaps indicated by the fact that Robinson soon gave it up. Once the field of academic cartography had grown some institutional roots, Robinson abandoned this argument, transitioning instead to a history of cartographic revolutions (Robinson 1976, 1982).

Henry Castner

One of Robinson’s doctoral students, Henry Castner (b. 1932), offered a revision of Robinson’s narrative of bifurcation that perpetuated the internalist disregard of social or cultural influences on change in cartographic practice. Together, they offered an explanation of change that wedded changes in cartographic practice to the established developmental model of traditional map history. Their common goal was to provide a definition of “thematic map,” the kind of map at the center of much post-war cartography both in the USA and Europe (Arnberger 1970, 20), yet which had so far eluded precise definition.

Castner had been editing the English translations of a number of Leo Bagrow’s unpublished manuscripts on the history of cartography in Russia before 1800 (published as Bagrow 1975). In line with traditional map history, Bagrow addressed what I am starting to call “synoptic” maps: coarser resolution geographical and marine maps that present a society’s accumulated geographical knowledge. This is a kind of map concept that simply ignores fine-resolution maps of places and territories. Many of Bagrow’s examples were administrative maps made in support of the management of Russian timber resources, such as:

Detail from Vasiliy Mikhailovich Shishkov and Ivan Shishkov’s map of the Kazan guberniya, “Karta Kazanskoy gubernii…opisi geodezistov Vasiliya i Ivana Shishkovykh” (1733), in “General’nyy atlas sochinyonnoy iz imeyushchikhsya pri Admiralteyskoy chertezhnoy raznykh godov opisey vsyakogo roda Iesam 1782 goda.” The map marks good pine forest (A) and worthless mixed forest (B). For another detail, see Postnikov (2019, fig. 805). Courtesy of the Rossiyskaya natsional’naya biblioteka, St. Petersburg (Manuscript Department, Hermitage Collection, f. 885, d. 610, map 31).

Such maps seemed to Castner to sit midway between the general purpose, reference map and the analytical map. In a presentation to the 8th International Cartographic Conference, held in Moscow in August 1976, Castner presented his argument (published as Castner 1980). He argued that all maps might be placed on a spectrum according to their ratio of “base” to “subject” information. At one end were maps entirely of base information; in the eighteenth century, this end comprised entirely synoptic reference maps that present the archive of primary locational data. At the other end were analytical maps with a small proportion of base information and the remainder subject information; the latter Castner defined as the “specialized information that is superimposed over a selection of base information and that represents the central thrust of topical matter of the map.” Any map might therefore “be characterized by the relative amounts and relative prominence of these two kinds of information.” In the middle of the continuum, comprised of approximately equal amounts of base and subject information were what he called “special-purpose” maps, typified by the Russian forest maps (Castner 1980, esp. 163–64).

Castner argued that in the eighteenth century, cartography began to evolve (his term) along the continuum with both the increase in the amount of base information and with the novel development of inventory mapping. The results of official surveys of forests, and also mineral resources, might not have generated true analytical maps (e.g., of the relative distributions of deciduous and coniferous trees) because the acts needed to generate them—the reduction and generalization of the base information and the abstraction of the subject information—were as yet little appreciated either by map makers or by map users. In this explanation, Castner continued to conceptualize the cartographic process as one in which the map designer created a map to be understood by the map reader in specific and constrained ways. Thus, the map maker

could not rely, as we do today, on his map reading audience having a strong enough mental image or schema of geographical areas to allow [the map maker] to generalize highly or [to] abstract [geographical areas] and still be sure that his readers could recognize them and supply the missing detail.

As a result, some maps may seem to be thematic in nature in that they appear to have been drawn to illustrate a specific distribution, concept, relationship, or event, but from a visual or graphic design point of view may seem to us to be more of a reference map. (Castner 1980, 164)

Castner used a series of examples to argue that inventory mapping in eighteenth-century Russia had made this first developmental step to the middle of the continuum, leading to the further step taken in the 1800s to true analytical mapping at the further end of the continuum.

In line with the long-standing developmental model of the history of cartography, Castner (1980, 173) concluded that “by 1800, Russian cartography had matured into an enterprise which produced a great variety of map products” (added emphasis). He reconfigured the equivalency drawn in the nineteenth century between the development of an entire culture and that of an individual organism into a less objectionable stance: cognitive development stemmed not from some metaphysical cultural growth (Zeitgeist or the more specific Kartengeist (Edney 2020) but from the general experience and practice of individuals within the culture. As people learned to process increasing amounts of data and as they became accustomed to more abstracted depictions of geographical features—as their cognitive experience and abilities grew more sophisticated—so specialized map makers could produce many more kinds of maps and expect them to be understood and read effectively. New kinds of special-purpose and thematic maps proliferated to augment existing reference maps. Castner’s developmental mechanism was thus, appropriately, internal to cartography itself.

Barbara Petchenik

To be clear, Castner’s published essay was influenced by an essay another of Robinson’s doctoral students and collaborator on theoretical approach to maps, Barbara Bartz Petchenik (1939–92); Petchenik had, in turn, reacted to Castner’s original conference presentation.

Petchenik built upon Castner’s conference presentation to offer a more precise definition of analytical maps. She adopted Castner’s insights to argue that analytical maps are differentiated from reference maps by the cognitive acts that are brought to bear by the map reader. Reference maps are concrete: they permit identification of being-in-place (“here is…”). Analytical maps are those that encourage knowing-about-space. In this respect, she objected to Castner’s identification of a third category of special-purpose maps as unsupported by cognitive psychology. At the same time, she rehearsed the arguments of cognitive psychologists that construct necessary parallels between the individual’s cognitive development (through biological growth and learning) with the cognitive development of an entire culture (through communal education). For both, development happens in small steps, building incrementally on prior achievements. There is, she implied, a long history of cartography that can be told as a history of cognitive development (Petchenik 1979, esp. 10–11, 9).

Petchenik’s arguments for the primacy of the reader in determining maps’ meanings, including her earlier presentation to Auto Carto II (Petchenik 1975), had little impact on other academic cartographers. Even so, they contributed to the formation of the sociocultural map concept. But that is another story.

Notes

n1. In my own writing about conceptions of “the map,” I use the terms coined earlier by Max Eckert (Eckert 1907, 1908, 1921–25) for the same concepts: not substantive and special, but “concrete” and “abstract.”

Works Cited

Arnberger, Erik. 1970. “Die Kartographie als Wissenschaft und ihre Beziehungen zur Geographie und Geodäsie.” In Grundsatzfragen der Kartographie, 1–28. Vienna: Österreichische geographische Gesellschaft, kartographische Kommission.

Azócar Fernández, Pablo Iván, and Manfred Ferdinand Buchroithner. 2014. Paradigms in Cartography: An Epistemological Review of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Heidelberg: Springer.

Bagrow, Leo. 1975. A History of the Cartography of Russia. Trans. V. Busch and Vladimir Kreicberg. Ed. Henry W. Castner. 2 vols. Wolfe Island, Ont.: The Walker Press.

Castner, Henry W. 1980. “Special Purpose Mapping in 18th Century Russia: A Search for the Beginnings of Thematic Mapping.” American Cartographer 7, no. 2: 163–75.

Crampton, Jeremy W. 2011. “Arthur Robinson and the Creation of America’s First Spy Agency.” International Cartographic Congress CO-174.

———. 2014. “The OSS Map Division.” OSS Society Journal: 80–81.

Eckert, Max. 1907. “Die Kartographie als Wissenschaft.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin 1907, no. 8: 539–55.

———. 1908. “On the Nature of Maps and Map Logic.” Translated by W. Joerg. Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 40, no. 6: 344–51. Reprinted in The Nature of Cartographic Communication, Cartographica Monograph 19, edited by Leonard Guelke (Toronto: B. V. Gutsell, 1977), 1–7.

———. 1921–25. Die Kartenwissenschaft: Forschungen und Grundlagen zu einer Kartographie als Wissenschaft. 2 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Edney, Matthew H. 2020. “Rethinking ‘Cartography’: Author’s Response to Review Forum on Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, ed. Jörn Seeman.” AAG Review of Books 8, no. 4: 223–35, esp. 231–34.

Imhof, Eduard. 1963. “Tasks and Methods of Theoretical Cartography.” Translated by Ernst Spiess and Mylon Merriam. Internationales Jahrbuch für Kartographie 3: 13–25.

Kanakubo, Tositomo. 1990. “The Development of Contemporary Theoretical Cartography.” Science Reports of the Toholu University, Seventh Series (Geography) 40: 1–19.

Martin, Lawrence. 2005 [1946]. “Arthur Robinson and the OSS: A Letter from Lawrence Martin, January 5, 1946.” Cartographic Perspectives 51: 67.

Morrison, Joel L. 1974. “Changing Philosophical-Technical Aspects of Thematic Cartography.” American Cartographer 1, no. 1: 5–14.

Petchenik, Barbara Bartz. 1975. “Cognition in Cartography.” In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computer-Assisted Cartography, 21–25 September 1975, 183–93. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census and the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping. Available at https://cartogis.org/autocarto/autocarto-archives/; reprinted in The Nature of Cartographic Communication, ed. Leonard Guelke, Cartographica Monograph, 19 (Toronto: B. V. Gutsell, 1977), 117–28.

———. 1979. “From Place to Space: The Psychological Achievement of Thematic Mapping.” American Cartographer 6, no. 1: 5–12.

Postnikov, Alexey V. 2019. “Thematic Mapping in Russia.” In Cartography in the European Enlightenment, edited by Matthew H. Edney, and Mary S. Pedley, 1392–95. Vol. 4 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Robinson, Arthur H. 1947. “Foundations of Cartographic Methodology.” Ph.D. dissertation. Geography. Ohio State University.

———. 1952. The Look of Maps: An Examination of Cartographic Design. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

———. 1955. “The 1837 Maps of Henry Drury Harness.” Geographical Journal 121, no. 4: 440–50.

———. 1970. “Erwin Josephus Raisz, 1893–1968.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60, no. 1: 189–93.

———. 1976. “Revolutions in Cartography.” In Technical Papers of the 36th Annual Meeting of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping, February, 1976, Washington, D.C, 333–39. Falls Church, Va.: American Congress on Surveying and Mapping.

———. 1982. Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.