Treating cartography as a formal communication system implies that we can improve map communication if we can reduce the filtering or loss of information at various points in the system where in the system should have a positive effect, and an information loss should be impossible to overcome. Most efforts to study cartographic communication have been directed to the middle stages in the system: the cartographer's transformation of selected information into the map and the initial extraction of information from the map by the user.
Alan MacEachrenRelated topics
cartography communication effect extraction filtering formal impossible information initial loss map middle overcome positive reduce should study system transformation treating user pointsRelated quotes
Do not do anything without signing yourself with the sign of the Cross! When you depart on a journey, when you begin your work, when you go to study, when you are alone, and when you are with other people, seal yourself with the Holy Cross on your forehead, your body, your chest, your heart, your lips, your eyes, your ears. All of you should be sealed with the sign of Christ's victory over hell. Then you will no longer be afraid of charms, evil spirits, or sorcery, because these are dissolved by the power of the Cross like wax before fire and like dust before the wind.
Cleopa Ilie
No matter how "right” you may be on various points, you must be diplomatic also. The first and important thing is not "rightness” at all, but Christian love and harmony. Most "crazy converts” have been "right” in the criticisms that led to their downfall; but they were lacking in Christian love and charity and so went off the deep end, needlessly alienating people around them and finally finding themselves all alone in their rightness and self-righteousness. Don't you follow them!...
Seraphim Rose
The assumption that effective cartographic technique and its evaluation is based in part on some subjective artistic or aesthetic sense on the part of the cartographer and map reader is somewhat disconcerting. For example, E. Raisz claims that the "effective use of lines or colors requires artistic judgment,” and J. K. Wright explains that the suitability of a symbol "depends on the map maker's taste and sense of harmony.” Throughout the literature there are numerous similar assertions regarding the assumed subjective aesthetic and artistic content of cartography.
Arthur H. Robinson
One of the greatest errors in the reconstruction of another era lies in our tendency to think of them as being like ourselves in feeling and attitudes. Actually, without considerable study on the part of a present-day man - if he were confronted by a fifteenth-century man - there would be no possible communication. I think it is possible through knowledge and discipline for a modern man to understand, and, to a certain extent, live into a fifteenth-century mind, but the reverse would be completely impossible.
John Steinbeck
A tonal type is minimally identifiable by its three markers and thus objectively observable completely apart from its musical or cultural context; it is 'scientific,' it is 'etic.' 'Mode' conversely is all bound up in sixteenth-century musical culture, not as a living doctrine of the music of the church and a heritage fomr the Middle Ages but also as a musical construct being expirimented with by members of the culture, from both humanistic and traditional points of view; it is thoroughly 'emic' and requires study on its own terms....
Harold Powers
