Mapping has traditionally focused not on the past, but on the future. Specifically, in considering courses of action. The Olympian perspective maps provide allow people to account for far more information than they can derive from their immediate surroundings in that particular moment. Having visualized a potential course of action, maps then lead back to the here and now, and indicate where the first step should fall. In other words, they're about identifying the optimal path from this moment into a future moment that is preferable to others.
In carrying out this process, there have always been four limiting factors. The first results from the precision and accuracy of the map itself. The second results from how well people can locate themselves in the map, and accordingly, how much confidence they can place in the plans they derive from it. The third, has to do with how swiftly people can toggle back and forth between the cartographic view (outside the bubble looking in) and the ground view (inside the bubble looking out). For example, 18th Century mariners using the lunar distance method for determining longitude at sea may need hours to gather raw information from the relative positions of the horizon, stars and moon then run the calculations to correctly position themselves on a map in order to determine the precise compass bearing they should follow, which is something we can no derive in realtime. The final limit has to do with the kinds of information that can be mapped, and how swiftly it can be refreshed. Once, we could only map coastlines. Now we can map the clouds above them. At the extent of the mappable expands, so does the range of factors that can guide our plans for the future.
As far as humans go, the first three factors have absolute theoretical limits while the fourth is theoretically unlimited. Google Glass represents a development in which all three of the theoretical limits are reached simultaneously, while the fourth has the lid taken off. Thanks to our survey instruments, we can expect to map the entire globe with millimeter precision, and locate any object within similar precision. Tools like Glass provided a realtime overlay of information that could, at one stage, only be gotten by consulting a map and plotting a course. And with billions of sensors on Earth and in Space feeding data to enormously powerful processing centers, the range of inputs for cartographic overlays just gets bigger and bigger.
I've become firmly convinced that our arrival at this points represents a seminal moment in human development, one that will stand out in the history of our species for centuries, if not millennia to come.
As someone with a degree in geography, this is a bit hyperbolic, and a bit of a one-sided, urban, first world, view of cartography that might be nice for advertisers in big cities with pervasive 4G or wifi, but will also be ignored everywhere else.
Mapping is traditionally about sensemaking and placemaking. Precision and accuracy are two different things, and both are entirely context dependent. There's a famous book, How to Lie with Maps, all about it. Maps are how we take things from others by drawing a line in a different place, or how we explore boundaries by drawing what we know and wondering what's everywhere else. They are stories on paper that sometimes have legal or royal or personal meaning, but they are always still stories. Geography is a social science, and cartography is as much art as it is evidence.
In Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton tells a story about maps, where your Google Glass example breaks down:
Imagine that you were kayaking off the coast of Greenland, and needed a chart to find your way. You might have a paper chart, but you will probably have trouble unfolding it with your mittens on, and in any case, it will probably get soaked in the process and become unreadable. From the urban perspective, an alternative solution might be to go to your PC and use a mapping program on the internet... However, there is a minor problem here, too. You don't have your PC with you in the arctic, much less in your kayak. We all know about internet-enabled cell phones and PDAs--they might provide another alternative. Why not jump on the internet using your cell phone, and get the map that way?
But here is the problem. You probably can't get cellular service where you are in your kayak. And even if you can, your battery is probably dead because it is so cold. Or, your phone won't work because it is wet. Even if your mobile phone does work, and you have service, you probably can't operate it because you can't do so without taking your mittens off, and it is too cold to do so.
Now let's look at a third approach, one that the Inuit have used... This shows two tactile maps of the coastline, carved out of wood. They can be carried inside your mittens, so your hands stay warm. They have infinite battery life, and can be read, even in the six months of the year that it is dark. And, if they are accidentally dropped in the water, they float. What you and I might see as a stick, for the Inuit can be an elegant design solution that is appropriate for their particular environment.
There are entire cultures where your Euro-centric view of mapping does not compute, so much so that researchers at my alma mater would go into jungles and teach third world tribes how the usurping white man views their world so they can make maps that you, the outsider, can understand what they had previously only expressed emotionally. There are entire continents where your "Mirror World" cannot accurately represent anything, and I feel that puts your seminal moment much further away than you imagine.
"There are entire continents where your "Mirror World" cannot accurately represent anything, and I feel that puts your seminal moment much further away than you imagine."
Really? Entire continents? Nothing whatsoever? Not even a coastline?
For what it's worth, I am acutely aware of non-western cartographic traditions. One of my own teachers is among the world's foremost experts in Chinese mapping, which (as you know) is astonishingly different from its European counterpart. I have also studied the cartographic traditions of the South Pacific, India, and Arabia, all of which combine different interests with different ways of thinking about them, and have resulted in wildly distinct senses of the world.
None of this changes the fact that the model now proliferating with GPS enables smartphones is, at heart, the Western one. And if you really think these things are limited to the rich world, you are simply unaware of what's actually happing all around us. By 2016 there will be more of these things on the planet that people, and not because everyone in the rich world owns half a dozen.
Whether or not the perspectives developed elsewhere can find their way into this framework is the thing I find fascinating. Even if they don't, the sheer scale of the economic changes wrought by the presently-unfolding geospatial revolution will secure this moment's place in history for ages to come. That's the thing about studying the world's cartographic traditions; you reach a point when you can recognize a big deal when you see one.
> Really? Entire continents? Nothing whatsoever? Not even a coastline?
As I said, accuracy is context-dependent. Satellites in space can tell you that sacred temple moves every time it is rebuilt, but everyone on the ground will tell you it has been the same temple in the same place for a thousand years. Which is accurate? Which matters? To whom? For what purpose?
> Whether or not the perspectives developed elsewhere can find their way into this framework is the thing I find fascinating.
To say that GPS and Western conceits about mapping are going to take over the world whether cultures with different concepts of place and time like it or not -- they can adapt or not -- has a lot of manifest destiny behind it, and I find it pretty professionally offensive. I think we lose a lot when you're expected to make a map so the souls of the dead can find their way using ArcGIS.
You, sir, have raised pedantry to a level I've never seen before on HN. But I'm not afraid to be servicy, so let me retroactively preface my remarks with the qualification that they apply only to members of the living, and not members of the dead and / or other residents of any spirit world currently known, or waiting to be discovered in this universe or any other.
Separately, I don't know why you're interpreting remarks about people around the world who are buying tools that improve their lots in life with "manifest destiny" which was a religious justification for the genocide of Native Americans in the 19th Century. For a guy so concerned about the meanings of precision and accuracy, this interpretation is hilariously devoid of either.
Pedantry? No, geography. A traditional use of maps is for the living to draw the locations with emotional significance to the deceased (and then you'd post them in their tomb). Chinese and Japanese maps both were more concerned with political and emotional importance than absolute scale.
So it is with many tribal cultures. Map-making as Westerners understand it may be completely foreign. Certainly it was for the Native Americans, and you see maps in tribal cultures reference landmarks and geographies that you simply can't see or understand without a deep understanding of the flora and fauna, with (what we would call) "distortions" applied to emphasize danger, or emotional meaning, or cultural import.
Except they're not distortions. They're accurate to the user of the map. They're just not accurate to your GPS system. Absolute scale is the only thing GPS is concerned with, but being able to define anything absolutely is an incredibly modern thing.
I don't see it as "people around the world who are buying tools that improve their lots in life." I think you are expressing a very imperialist mindset with the words you are using. A GPS system which cannot innately apply emotional or cultural distortions to match the worldview of the user is, by that very nature, imposing the worldview of the GPS creator on it.
So, yes, I think manifest destiny is exactly what you're advocating for in your comments here.
Did it ever occur to you that cartographic paradigms are like languages? In the same way you can learn French without giving up Italian, did you know you can learn to see the world through a new lens without abandoning one that's very different?
I'm asking because you note that "Chinese and Japanese maps both were more concerned with political and emotional importance than absolute scale." Like I said before, this isn't news to me. I've spent a fair amount of time with traditional Chinese cartography. I understand (and greatly appreciate) how fluidly it's related to Chinese poetry and literature, incorporating them in ways that are largely alien to the western map-making tradition.
But I'm also aware that China is launching its own GPS system, and that people in China do, in fact, use GPS to find their way around. Indeed, they're investing in it heavily. I'm sorry, but "choosing to invest in a technology" is just not the same as "being murdered en masse by foreigners claiming divine justification."
While I'm sure there are lots of people who use geo-aware devices to improve their lives, being both a geographer by education and a UX designer by profession means I'm also sure lots of them would prefer to use a geo-aware device which takes their cultural preferences into account.
While a culture doesn't "have" to abandon its old ways, when a militarily superior presence arrives and says "we own all of this now because this GPS-made map says so" and you have no way of representing your territorial boundaries except in terms of "that sacred land on the third loop of this animal's migratory trail" and "twelve generations of reconstructing this holy temple in the same spot which moves because it's on the shore of a river that changes course and width and breadth constantly," and your kids who were previously happy hunting in the forest by day and smoking around a campfire by night now want guns and jeans and Nintendos because they're novel, it's hard to reconcile the two. Now you have to figure out French without anyone wanting to teach it to you, because then they don't get to pave over your Italian land if you figure out how to explain that it's yours in French, and also stop your kids from becoming indentured French servants just to spite you. It's a technology that's been forced upon you; you haven't been given the choice to "invest" in it on your own terms.
These are real things that happen. This is not a contrived example. This is what geographers at my alma mater dealt with, teaching non-first-world peoples how to use GPS against encroaching developers and governments, and how to translate between their native cultural "distortions" and the emotionlessness, meaninglessness, absolutism of GPS and GIS.
In carrying out this process, there have always been four limiting factors. The first results from the precision and accuracy of the map itself. The second results from how well people can locate themselves in the map, and accordingly, how much confidence they can place in the plans they derive from it. The third, has to do with how swiftly people can toggle back and forth between the cartographic view (outside the bubble looking in) and the ground view (inside the bubble looking out). For example, 18th Century mariners using the lunar distance method for determining longitude at sea may need hours to gather raw information from the relative positions of the horizon, stars and moon then run the calculations to correctly position themselves on a map in order to determine the precise compass bearing they should follow, which is something we can no derive in realtime. The final limit has to do with the kinds of information that can be mapped, and how swiftly it can be refreshed. Once, we could only map coastlines. Now we can map the clouds above them. At the extent of the mappable expands, so does the range of factors that can guide our plans for the future.
As far as humans go, the first three factors have absolute theoretical limits while the fourth is theoretically unlimited. Google Glass represents a development in which all three of the theoretical limits are reached simultaneously, while the fourth has the lid taken off. Thanks to our survey instruments, we can expect to map the entire globe with millimeter precision, and locate any object within similar precision. Tools like Glass provided a realtime overlay of information that could, at one stage, only be gotten by consulting a map and plotting a course. And with billions of sensors on Earth and in Space feeding data to enormously powerful processing centers, the range of inputs for cartographic overlays just gets bigger and bigger.
I've become firmly convinced that our arrival at this points represents a seminal moment in human development, one that will stand out in the history of our species for centuries, if not millennia to come.