Alan MacEachren: Visual

Alan MacEachren is American geographer. Explore interesting quotes on visual.
Alan MacEachren: 46   quotes 0   likes

“Maps have been a successful form of representation for centuries by making the world understandable through systematic abstraction that retains the iconicity of space depicting space. Advances in methods and technologies are blurring the lines among maps and other forms of visual representation and pushing the bounds of “map” as a concept toward both more realistic and more abstract depiction. As a result, there are a variety of unanswered questions about the attributes and implications of “maps.””

Alan MacEachren

Source: Research challenges in geovisualization (2001), p. 6-7

World , Understanding , Question , Success

“Use of the term visualization in the cartographic literature can be traced back at least four decades (Philbrick, 1953). It was the 1987 publication of a report by the U. S. National Science Foundation, however, that established a new meaning for this term in the context of scientific research (McCormick et al., 1987). The report, produced by a committee containing no cartographers, emphasized the role of computer display technology in prompting mental visualization - and subsequent insight. Scientific visualization has, thus, been defined as the use of sophisticated computing technology to create visual displays, the goal of which is to facilitate thinking and problem solving. Emphasis is not on storing knowledge but on knowledge construction.”

Alan MacEachren

Source: Exploratory cartographic visualization: advancing the agenda (1997), p. 2

Literature , Knowledge , Problem , Thinking

“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

“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

“It may be that the human brain not only perceives but stores the essentials of a visual scene using the same geometrical, quasi-symbolic, minimalist vocabulary found in maps.”

Alan MacEachren

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 171

“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

“When visualization tools act as a catalyst to early visual thinking about a relatively unexplored problem, neither the semantics nor the pragmatics of map signs is a dominant factor. On the other hand, syntactics (or how the sign-vehicles, through variation in the visual variables used to construct them, relate logically to one another) are of critical importance.”

Alan MacEachren

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 368

Problem , Thinking