eugene@nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya) (04/04/91)
%A Mark Monmonier
%T How to Lie with Maps
%I U. Chicago Press
%C Chicago
%D 1991
$12.95
Some time in the last week, I heard about this book. I chanced to
see it in Printer's Inc. (Mountain View, and probably in Palo Alto).
The title is a take off on D. Huff's "How to Lie with Statistics"
the classic thin book on basic statistics. Huff is one of the
acknowledgements.
Maps are without question the most pervasive and influential images
in our world. The "signal to noise" ratio is greater on a map than any
other image in society. They model ideas like
scale and proportion and symbolism. More imagery (like the
so-called "scientific visualizations") should strive for the quality
of good maps.
Contents:
Introduction
Elements of the Map [Legends, Scale, symbology, projections]
Map Generalization: Little White Lies and Lots of Them
Blunders that Mislead
Maps that Advertise
Development Maps (or How to Seduce the Town Board)
Maps for Political Propaganda
Maps, Defense and Disinformation: Fool Thine Enemy
Data Maps: Making Nonsense of the Census
Color: Attraction and Distraction (No color in the book)
An excellent and useful set of references. All this from a quickie scan.
The author is a geography prof at Sycracuse.
A shortcoming of the book is that it seems to fail to talk about the
limitations of models. It does talk about:
distortion, simplification, generalization, illusion. The author
fortunately stays away from determining the length of the coastline
of England (the topical example from Chaos theory).
Still, the title, like Huff's book, catches the eye.
It skirts some of the issues of geographic information systems
(e.g., it topically mentioned electromagnetic pulse in the defense
section: DMA readers note).
The book is not quite as presumptous as Edward Tufte's two good books
(i.e., Ducks or color) on data display. "How-to" is fairly inexpensive
so I recommend buying it.
"How-to" is NOT specifically designed to teach cartography. Other books
are for the student, instead, this is for the map user.
If you are an individual lacking "a sense of maps," unfortunately,
this book won't help (you'd best start off with a good geometry
text [perhaps Bill if you are reading this, you can start on the
book we've been talking about].
I think chapter two "Elements" is the best chapter. The other are examples.
Followups to rec.arts.books. Comments to me via email.
Some reader of the geography mailing list can forward this quick review
I've lost my mail path for it. Charles, if you want a review for Pixel
I'll write something up more formally, let me know.
--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@orville.nas.nasa.gov
Resident Cynic, Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers
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