Alan MacEachren: Information

“Geovisualization integrates approaches from visualization in scientific computing (ViSC), cartography, image analysis, information visualization, exploratory data analysis (EDA), and geographic information systems (GISystems) to provide theory, methods, and tools for visual exploration, analysis, synthesis, and presentation of geospatial data”

Alan MacEachren

any data having geospatial referencing
Source: Research challenges in geovisualization (2001), p. 3

“Many pressing problems facing science and society are inherently geospatial – location matters. The availability of essential geospatial data has increased dramatically over the past decade. Both scientific progress and application of geospatial information to societal needs remains hampered, however, due to the lack of methods for transforming these data into information and for combining information from diverse sources to construct knowledge. Progress requires fundamental breakthroughs in both geovisualization and its integration with other methods for geospatial knowledge construction. The research agenda delineated in this issue is a step toward achieving these breakthroughs. Identifying the challenges is the easy part. Meeting them is unlikely without a commitment to a coordinated approach, by both individuals and organizations in multiple countries.”

Alan MacEachren

Source: Research challenges in geovisualization (2001), p. 12. summary

Knowledge , Problem , Science , Past

“Understanding how maps work and why maps work (or do not work) as representations in their own right and as prompts to further representations, and what it means for a map to work, are critical issues as we embark on a visual information age.”

Alan MacEachren

(2004), p. v
How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995)

Age , Understanding

“Jacques Bertin's books Semiology of Graphics and Graphics and Graphic Information Processing have been stimuli for my own thinking about the representation and analysis of geographic information. I have also used both books as core readings for graduate seminars and they have generated lively discussion and prompted innovative research. I often ask graduate students to consider how cartographic research and practice in the U. S. might be different today if the English edition of Semiology of Graphics had appeared in 1967 (when it was published in French), rather than in 1983. I know that my own work would have been dramatically different if I had encountered these ideas a decade and a half sooner.”

Alan MacEachren

Alan MacEachren (2000) " An evolving cognitive-semiotic approach to geographic visualization and knowledge construction http://www.geovista.psu.edu/storage/alan/amm_InfoDesign.pdf"

Books , Idea , Thinking , Appearance

“Exploring maps as representation forges important links between cartography and a variety of cognate fields concerned with this topic in its various facets (including geographical information systems [GIs] and remote sensing, as well as art, cognitive science, sociology, cognitive and environmental psychology, semiotics, and even the history and philosophy of science).”

Alan MacEachren

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 1

Art , History , Sense , Science

“The nature of maps and of their use in science and society is in the midst of remarkable change - change that is stimulated by a combination of new scientific and societal needs for geo-referenced information and rapidly evolving technologies that can provide that information in innovative ways. A key issue at the heart of this change is the concept of "visualization."”

Alan MacEachren

Source: Exploratory cartographic visualization: advancing the agenda (1997), p. 1

Way , Nature , Science , Change

“Cartography as a discipline has a significant stake in the evolving role of maps within systems for scientific visualization, within spatial decision support systems, within hypermedia information access systems, and within virtual reality environments.”

Alan MacEachren

Source: Exploratory cartographic visualization: advancing the agenda (1997), p. 1

Support , Reality , Decision

“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 MacEachren

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 5

Communication , Effort , Study , Loss