Maps and emotions: Map movilized farmers

You can download the map (5.0 MB) version here

This map with potential locations of  a new highway corridor between New Hamburg and Stratford in southern Ontario. I studied the maps of this Ontario Ministry of Transportation  highway corridor study and environmental assessment quite a bit and plan to write some posts on how maps can be used to 'frame' an issue, that is, with or without intention, try to naturalize a perspectival view as natural and objective.THE Truth, ALL the Truth, and  NOTHING BUT the Truth.

For the moment however a few words on maps and emotions. Not only do emotions substantially influence the way we make sense out of a map, maps can also be what neuro-scientist Antonio Damasio calls 'emotionally competent stimuli', that is, they can trigger or arouse emotions. (For a good example see my post on 'the Swiss Cheese Map').

Anybody can quickly figure out that that out of the myriad of route alternatives on the above map only one could be chosen to actually construct a highway. However, the visual impact on many owners of farm businesses living and working under these 'broad yellow brush strokes' that 'covered all the land' was already caused before those farmers started conscious reasoning on the map. Our emotions are the outcome of very fast evaluative processes, and the feelings they produce precede and provide direction to our conscious thinking.The strong feelings caused by this map provided much of the impulse that led to the constitution of the Agricultural Business Communities of Perth East, Perth South, and Wilmot West (ABC), according to one of the leaders of the group .

While at the University of Waterloo, and now from Ontario's north I assist the group in putting it's information and perspectives ignored by the Ministry, on the map. More on this in a later post.

Lessons from the Swiss Cheese Map

Shari Motro, now a universtiy professor of law in the U.S. relates an intriguing story of how the Swiss Cheese Map which he himself helped to draw in Oslo in 1995 blew up a virtual agreement between Palestinians and Israel.

The map was introduced just 24 hours before the agreement was to be signed. When Yasir Arafat saw it, he stormed out of the negotiating room. Uri Savir, Israel’s chief negotiator at the talks, recalls the Palestinian leader’s reaction:

Arafat glared at [the map] in silence, then sprang out of his chair and declared it to be an insu­erable humiliation. “These are cantons! You want me to accept cantons! You want to destroy me!”

Motri's article however goes further than telling what went wrong, and provides us with a series of lessons he learned concerning the use of maps in diplomacy and negotiation, illustrated by a series of maps.
You can access the article here on 'legal Affairs', or dowload a pdf version here.



For those who want to dig deeper into the issue of cheese maps, you can visit an interactive map of the Swiss Cheese Landscape here

 Or read more about this Canada Cheese Map here

Tactical Tech's Maps for Advocacy Guide

Established in 2003, Tactical Tech is an international NGO "working at the point where rights advocacy meets information management and technology".

Along with other guides and tool kits in 2008 it has published a very good orientation guide for advocacy mapping. After a short introduction of what advocacy mapping is all about, the 26 page booklet provides an overview of what techniques, software, and media can be used and some possible sources data sources you might tap.  You can download this guide and other materials from their Web site.

On Prisons and Freedom: a tale of two cities

My experiments with cartograms were inspired by the work of the people who did not only made cartograms more popular than ever, but who also did invaluable work in making the creation of cartograms a lot easier than it was! The World Mapper Team has published over 600 cartograms on its web site. So many that only later, after being advised by somebody else, I found out they already had published a cartogram on imprisonment.

 World Prison Population and Incarceration Rates

Cartogram by Maps at Work

Data:  International Centre for Prison Studies. King's College (London, UK)

This particular cartogram however is different; it is a bi-variate version.The size of the countries indicates the total prison population: the bigger the country the more people in prison. In turn, the hue indicates the incarceration rates. For example, China and the U.S. have similar total prison populations (expressed approximately same land area), but China (light hue) imprisons relatively few of its citizens as compared to the US (dark color).

Cartograms are an underused technique. Not only for geography teaching, but also for advocacy mapping.

Contrary to conventions I put the higher numbers and the darker hues at the bottom of the legend, because I feel the more people a country has to incarcerate the lower its has sunk (So, Lakoff's 'More is Up'  maybe is not a universal metaphor). Does this mean that the countries with light hue do well? By no means. They may have good government and cultural mechanisms that prevents excessive crime and violence, have more formal or informal restorative justice, more humane forms of punishment than imprisonment, but just as well an incompetent police force and inefficient justice system, or effective preventive repression.

Here is another map. Not on imprisonment, but on 'freedom'. Maps can be bold, and this one certainly is. How many assumptions, political stances, and economic interest is there behind this map. How is freedom understood, defined and measured? Freedom for who? Freedom of what? And the bottom line: Who has the freedom to define what freedom is? Its all hidden behind the map's surface. As simply as a traffic light: Red, Green, and a colour in between. Now anybody can understand where freedom can be found and where not. As simple as that! Freedom, poor little girl, everybody's maiden.

Freedom House world map 2009

Source: Freedom House 

Case studies in Advocy Mapping

The New York based Open Society Foundations (yes, plural, with an s at the end!)  'works to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens'. (www.soros.org) One of their work horses are maps.

The Foundation in 2006 supported an excellent and very accessible piece of work on Advocacy Mapping authored by Stephanie Lindenbaum.

"GIS (Graphical Information Systems) and Mapping technologies have grown in popularity in recent years, proportional to their decrease in cost. With the recent advent of GoogleMaps, YahooMaps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth API, all available for free on the Web, both advanced programmers and individuals with more rudimentary skills have taken on mapping projects in an effort to display complex data, catalyze activism and even merely show off and play around.
The 10 case studies selected in this publication focus on GIS mapping projects primarily in the context of advocacy work in North America. Although this is somewhat regrettable from a diversity-in-geography standpoint, the studies all vary in focus, technology, organizational goals and staffing."

The publication is available for download on their website (download page).