Envisioning the future of cartographic research

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a special issue of the International Journal of Cartography that envisions the future of cartographic research. Following a process of collaborative ideation among International Cartographic Association (ICA) commissions, their members and other allied scholars and professionals, five articles have been crafted to highlight challenges and opportunities for cartographic research in the decades ahead. The first article characterizes the evolution of cartographic research through analysis of the activities of the ICA. Next, we present four new research agendas on persistent problems in cartographic research, big data and geovisual analytics, designing across map use contexts and use and user issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Research agenda
• cartography
• big data
• user studies
• media
• context
• map design
• geovisualization

Introduction

Cartography is in a pivotal moment, as the nexus of social and technological change now makes maps and geographic data visible and useful for the most serious as well as the most mundane human problems. In the last decade alone, location-based services have moved from a theoretical concept to a daily reality for millions around the world. Geographic data streams are growing in size and complexity, and user expectations for advanced analytical tools are increasing just as quickly. The distinction between map users and map designers is changing (or perhaps disappearing), and the methods used to research and evaluate maps are changing too. Yet, despite these developments in Cartography (or perhaps because of them), many research questions remain unanswered and many societal implications remain unexplored. It is with these influences in mind that we collect here a range of perspectives on the evolution and future of cartographic research.

Defining what is (and what is not) Cartography in the contemporary era is a challenge. The International Cartographic Association (ICA) defines Cartography as the discipline that deals with the art, science and technology of making and using maps. These key elements can be found across the research agenda articles we present in this issue, but many additional dimensions go beyond this common core. At present, there are 27 topics represented within the ICA by dedicated commissions. Some of these commissions are focused on application areas (e.g. Mountain Cartography), others on technological paradigms (e.g. Location-Based Services), or crosscutting concerns (e.g. Generalization and Multiple Representation). In most areas, there are tacit connections to allied academic and technological disciplines, including cognitive science, computer science, education, graphic design, human–computer interaction, information visualization, and statistics, to name but a few. The agenda articles in this special issue also engage with the diversity of topics and array of influences that represent the expanding edges of Cartography.

A common theme across the research agenda articles is their focus on eliciting new ideas for future cartographic research from the community of cartographic scholars, and in Kraak and Fabrikant’s case, to reflect on the evolution of cartographic research up until this time as well. In developing each article, the authors have been mindful of the need to strike a balance between the development of new ideas and connections to previous scholarship. As a result, the literature cited in each article is not intended to be exhaustive, but is instead a targeted sampling to highlight foundational ideas and exciting new directions.

These contributions build on a significant body of prior research agendas in cartography and GIScience. Previous work has focused on geovisualization (MacEachren & Kraak, 1997; MacEachren, 1994; Virrantaus, Fairbairn, & Kraak, 2009), geovisual analytics (Andrienko et al., 2007), representational techniques (Skupin & Fabrikant, 2003) and interaction paradigms (Peterson, 1997; Roth, 2013), among others too numerous to fully explore here. A key motivation for the articles presented here was to complement seminal work in a special issue of Cartography and Geographic Information Science, published in 2001, which resulted in a range of new research agendas for cartography that spanned the most urgent topics of that time, some of which persist today (MacEachren & Kraak, 2001; Cartwright et al., 2001; Fairbairn, Andrienko, Andrienko, Buziek, & Dykes, 2001; Gahegan, Wachowicz, Harrower, & Rhyne, 2001; Slocum et al., 2001).

This special issue begins with an overview and analysis of the evolution of cartographic research in the ICA by Kraak and Fabrikant. This work is followed by four research agendas focusing on persistent problems in cartographic research, big data and geovisual analytics, designing across map use contexts, and emerging research foci related to use and user issues. The latter three agenda articles are the product of a long-term, collaborative effort described below.

Agenda development

Three of the articles in this special issue (Robinson et al., Griffin et al. and Roth et al.) are the product of a multiyear, multiphase collaboration across the ICA Commissions on Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Visualization; Map Design; Use, User, and Usability Issues; and Visual Analytics. The intention was to build new research agendas via a bottom-up, collective process.

In the first phase of the collaboration, members of each commission participated in a web-based activity to generate potential research challenge topics using Google Moderator. This activity resulted in the development of 29 candidate research topics for the special issue (Tables 1 and 2). Following a ranking and discussion phase, we then decided to solicit short position papers on three key topics that encapsulated major themes among the contributed ideas. The three themes were representing and interacting with big data, research methods in cartography and geovisualization, and designing across human abilities and map use contexts.

Table 1. Research questions suggested by ICA Commission Members.

Research questions
How can we take advantage of advances in psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of spatiotemporal decision-making with cartographic displays?
Maps have a potential role to play in big data analysis, we need to know which map representations are suitable as summary maps of big data? How can map design be improved to become an interface to big data?
Can we develop a systematic understanding of human perceptual and cognitive abilities/limitations in relation to the use of geographic visualization?
Many new user research methods and techniques are emerging, so how do we optimally apply and investigate the usability of the variety of methods and techniques of use and user research in cartographic research?
Does the mobile platform require us to revise or rethink time-tested tenets of cartographic design? How should we design our interactive maps to respond across multiple devices, both mobile and non-mobile?
How do we modify our empirical methods to study mobile maps in the wild?
Will the increased mobility of maps alter our sense of place?
One of the biggest problems (but at the same time opportunity) is that everybody can be a cartographer. How can we ensure that resulting products are user friendly, and have significant communicative power?
In which contexts are bottom-up or top-down decision-making circuits more important, and how can we link the design of maps to support whichever of those processes is more important for a given context?
How do we encourage more cartographic experts to share their knowledge and teach beginners? How do we inspire these beginners to learn more?
How can we, as cartographers, start re-establishing cartography by encouraging people inside and out to acknowledge the expertise a cartographer can offer and see them as vital in an organizational context?
So far there is no measurement framework for assessing the validity and limits of cartographic outputs constructed after the process of mapping. What scientific approaches can we use to advance this issue?
Are local mapping communities more effective than larger, national ones?
Can cartography be generalized; that is, can knowledge about conventions, good practices, etc., adapted to the specific constraints of maps, be used, adapted or generalized in the context of geovisualization?
What other spaces aside from Euclidean space can the epistemology of cartography work with?
Can mobile maps be used to help solve society’s most pressing problems?
How do we lower the barriers of entry and minimize technology anxiety within cartography?
Is it time that the epistemology and notion of cartography must be emphasized in the definition of cartography, that is, re-defined to reflect the epistemology and notion of cartography instead?

Table 2. Research themes suggested by ICA Commission Members.

Research themes
Empirical research in an interdisciplinary setting should seek to reveal evidence about the correlation between selected user experience factors and cartographic factors like graphical and interaction design.
Cartographers struggle to create useful spatiotemporal overviews and support analytical reasoning in large, complex datasets. We need new ways to symbolize these data to make their information actionable.
We need to develop cartographic approaches for data coming from different sources, at different scales in space and time, having different quality and reliability.
We need to devise cartographic approaches for massive streaming data: this requires scalable processing and filtering of data, interactive and dynamic representations need to be designed, implemented and evaluated.
We need to develop a new paradigm for visualizing spatiotemporal data to support sensemaking; one that supports space, time and models, from large, complex datasets, including new sources likes sensor networks.
It is important to investigate whether the virtual and augmented reality technology will be user friendly and effective to all, regardless of their literacy and education levels.
We should explore artistic representations; for example, geovisual tools derived from fine art or music, rather than only scientific representations. Art could perhaps be harnessed to support spatiotemporal data mining.
We should focus on increasing cartographic literacy, motivating software vendors to include intelligent cartography modules in their products.
We need to develop a typology of data properties that should help identifying and correcting problems in data and selecting appropriate analysis procedures and cartographic representations for spatiotemporal data.
Working with spatiotemporal data remains problematic. Despite software’s increasing ability to manage, analyze and visualize space-time data, performance for all of these decreases when data sets increase in size.
Choropleth maps mislead the eye for many reasons. Continuous surface models have long been shown to represent the underlying landscape in a more realistic manner, yet surface models are not in the mainstream.

Fifteen scholars then submitted position papers to drive discussion at a workshop titled Envisioning the Future of Cartographic Research held in Curitiba, Brazil in August 2015, immediately preceding the ICA conference in Rio de Janeiro. At this workshop, participants from the four Commissions, as well as faculty and students from the Federal University of Paraná and other institutions in Brazil, worked together in-person in three groups to develop concept maps that expanded on the three key topics listed above, and to develop detailed outlines for the final three research agenda articles presented in this special issue.

Following the 2015 ICA meeting, members from each of these three groups then worked to develop draft research agenda articles based upon the workshop discussions and outlines. Each of these draft articles was circulated to two expert reviewers within Cartography who did not participate in the earlier development of the articles, to get feedback on the initial ideas proposed by each group. One reviewer read all three articles, while the second reviewer was different for each of the articles. The expert feedback and the draft articles were then discussed at a second face-to-face meeting at the American Association of Geographers’ Meeting in San Francisco in April 2016. Several days later, the core ideas of each of the articles, improved by feedback and discussion among the groups, were presented to the broader cartographic community in a panel discussion at the 2016 AAG, from which further feedback on the ideas was collected. Each article underwent a final revision based on this feedback, and was then submitted for the normal review process to the International Journal of Cartography.

The other two articles of the special issue dovetail with these ICA workshops, and draw upon a wider range of scholars and professionals. The article written by Çöltekin et al. was also developed in a bottom-up fashion within a multiyear, multiphase project, with participant discussion and data collection on its key topics at multiple conferences and workshops between 2011 and 2013. Kraak and Fabrikant developed their contribution in part based on input collected at the 2016 Cartographic Summit held in Redlands, California. This event drew together key thinkers, technologists and media experts from within and outside of Cartography to envision the future of mapping.

Crosscutting themes

The contributions in this special issue highlight several crosscutting themes. Cartography is Dynamic, as it leverages rapidly changing data, embraces new forms of technology, and is applied to constantly changing phenomena. Cartography is Insightful, as maps and their users are expected to deliver insight to shape the future. Cartography is Responsive because map users are making and changing maps themselves, and maps are in turn causing users to change. And finally, Cartography is Diverse as a wide range of data, users, interfaces and problems constitute the context within which mapping is applied. We explore each of these dimensions in more detail below.

1. Data, problem contexts and technologies in cartography are more dynamic than ever. Each year new statistics are quoted, such as the fact that a large percentage of the world’s data were generated in the last two years, or some number of quintillion bytes of data are created every day. For many phenomena, it is now possible to create maps that are updated in real-time. Paralleling this data dynamism is device dynamism, where new display devices and forms are developed and devices become obsolete more quickly than ever before. At the time of the 2001 Geovisualization Commission research agenda (MacEachren & Kraak, 2001), touchscreens were unusual, applied only for specific application areas like point-of-sale devices, rather than everyday computing devices that can be found in most people’s pockets. Thus, displays designed and optimized for a given device must be adapted and redesigned to work with new devices, new interaction methods and new display forms. Now more than ever, we need smart defaults and responsive design, yet there are few measures of success for evaluating if the design is as dynamic as the data and technology.

2. Because maps are used to solve problems that underlie the sustainability of life on Earth (e.g. climate change, water resource allocation, declines in biodiversity, etc.), understanding how maps are insightful is more important than ever. While a general goal is to design representations that generate insight efficiently and effectively from complex and often voluminous data, evaluating a map’s ability to do so requires that we identify a set of tasks that can be used for such evaluations. By definition, an insight is something new, yet many experimental tasks measure the ability of a design to support identification of something that is already known; creating a conundrum. Finally, there is the question of how characteristics of map users (e.g. their spatial abilities, domain knowledge, etc.) interact with a display to support the generation of insights. Are all maps equally effective for all people? This is unlikely, yet without knowledge of these interactions, it is difficult to either improve a person’s capability to use a particular representation or adapt the design for the person.

3. Map users directly influence the map in new ways, and maps therefore must be responsive to those influences. Non-experts are now routinely engaged in mapmaking; today, more maps are made by people without any cartographic training than by trained cartographers. The data we use for mapping are also increasingly influenced by the public. In some cases, people are volunteering their time to develop shared geographic information sources (e.g. OpenStreetMap). In other cases, contributed geographic data come from ambient sources like the telemetry from mobile devices, and may in fact be collected without users’ direct knowledge (or consent). Furthermore, the interactions users have with search engines and web maps may influence what is mappable in the future. Search results are now used to predict demand for search results in the future, and already we see stark differences in the quality and timeliness of geographic data in web maps depending on how many people are looking at a location. We also note efforts like Missing Maps, which support humanitarian efforts through the development of basemaps for places that do not have excellent map coverage from commercial providers. We need to know how maps can be responsive to humans, and to also understand how humans are responding to maps.

4. Finally, the full spectrum of diversity plays a crucial role in shaping what is mapped and how it is mapped today. Data types are more diverse than ever, including multimedia, texts, and other sources that stretch traditional means of cartographic representation. Potential users of maps come from all walks of life, in all ages, and individual differences among map users should drive how we design maps. The reasons why people need maps are also more diverse than ever – ranging from the mundane action of finding a nearby coffee shop to the critical function of highlighting evacuation routes in a disaster situation. The ways in which we see and interact with maps also are widely varied, including traditional paper formats as well as a panoply of digital interfaces. Finally, diversity also is increasing in the types of method available to study maps, and the purposes for employing these methods in the first place. We need clearer guidance on how to compare, adapt and administer these methods to improve our map designs.

Contributions

The five articles we present in this special issue of the International Journal of Cartography provide a vision for future cartographic research in light of the crosscutting themes we describe above.

Kraak and Fabrikant

This issue begins with Kraak and Fabrikant discussing the role of maps in today’s society. They explore the range of ways that maps are used and how both the discipline of Cartography and maps themselves are defined, and suggest changes to how we define what a map is. Finally, they explore how our evolving understanding of Cartography has been expressed in changes in the work of the ICA and its Commissions over time.

Çöltekin et al.

Çöltekin et al. explore the differences between top-down research agenda priorities and what researchers view as persistent problems in geovisualization. A number of expert-derived research agendas have been offered over the years in geovisualization and geovisual analytics, and Çöltekin et al. probe the extent to which end-users of such agendas agree with or deviate from their stated priority areas, with the goal of identifying potential new areas where geovisualization research is necessary and likely to have a significant impact.

Robinson et al.

In Robinson et al., the frontiers of cartographic research in the era of big data are envisioned – focusing on the ways that cartographic approaches can help solve problems with big geographic data. Specifically, they call for new cartographic research to address challenges regarding big data volume, velocity, variety and veracity. In contrast to previous agendas focusing on GIScience and big data, this work highlights areas that cartographers need to address in order to design maps that make a meaningful societal difference, and includes a strong focus on the artistic potential of cartography for big data as well as its scientific and technical potential.

Griffin et al.

Griffin et al. examine how the broadening use of maps in different contexts poses challenges for map designers. They propose the use of the concepts of transferability and relevance to guide designers in making best use of empirical studies of map use to inform design. They also identify specific challenges and opportunities for empirical map use research that will enable us to improve the design of maps to support specific activities, audiences and environments and work towards a more holistic map design theory.

Roth et al.

The contribution by Roth et al. probes how we know if a map design ‘works’ in an era of interactive, web-enabled, and mobile mapping, exploring the value of user studies in Cartography. They explore the differing goals and outcomes of basic science research on the use of interactive maps versus user-centered design studies, with particular attention to methodological needs and adaptations that are necessary for working with interactive maps rather than those methods developed when static maps were the primary object of study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Amy L. Griffin is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Physical, Environmental, and Mathematical Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. Dr. Griffin's research focuses on understanding the implications for map design of the cognitive, perceptual and affective processes of map users. She is currently the co-Chair of the Commission on Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Visualization (CogVis) of the International Cartographic Association.

Dr Anthony C. Robinson is Assistant Professor, Director for Online Geospatial Education programmes and Assistant Director for the GeoVISTA research centre in the Department of Geography at Penn State University. Dr Robinson’s research focuses on the science of interface and interaction design for geographic visualization software tools. He currently serves as the Chair of the Commission on Visual Analytics for the International Cartographic Association.

Dr Robert E. Roth is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison teaching and researching the topics of Cartography, Geovisualization, and Geovisual Analytics. He currently serves as a co-Chair of the Commission on Use, User, and Usability Issues of the International Cartographic Association.

ORCID

Amy L. Griffin http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6548-7970

Anthony C. Robinson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5249-8010

Robert E. Roth http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1241-318X