Symbolics, Syntactics, and Semantics:Teaching a Language of Maps

Phil Gersmehl

ContentsWake-Up Call: Remembering a Map of Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Mapping as Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Encoding a Location on a Treasure Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Primary-School Maps and Children’s Atlases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Putting a Rug in a Classroom Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Parallel Networks for Processing Spatial Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8Models of Cartographic Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11Kuhnian Revolutions in Academic Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13The Role of Geospatial Information Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15Map Comparison: Using Maps to Discern/Describe Spatial Associations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16Conclusion: Becoming an Expert Map Reader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22One Last Example, from a 2018 Geography Journal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22One Last Point, Do Map Projections Cause Misperceptions? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

AbstractMaps are attempts to communicate, but is mapping a language? Like verbal texts,maps carry several kinds of messages at the same time. Many map symbolsrepresent facts about specific places. At the same time, their positions on the mapcan reveal distances, directions, patterns, feature associations, and other spatialrelationships. Unfortunately, human brains seldom remember shapes and sizesaccurately. A workshop “game” helps us understand why – the human visualsystem processes incoming images through multiple, parallel pathways, onlysome of which typically lead to conscious awareness. Decades of research bycartographers have given us a number of useful “rules of thumb” about symbol

P. Gersmehl (*)Michigan Geographic Alliance, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, USA

New York Center for Geographic Learning, New York, NY, USAe-mail: pgersmehl@gmail.com

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019S. D. Brunn, R. Kehrein (eds.), Handbook of the Changing World Language Map,https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73400-2_172-1

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selection, size, visual hierarchy, color sequences, type design and placement, andso forth. More recent research by psychologists and neuroscientists (aided by newbrain-scanning technology) has put some of those principles on more solidtheoretical grounds. Together, these two lines of research lead to the disturbingconclusion that some popular educational approaches are unlikely to be success-ful. Educators should approach the teaching of the “vocabulary” and “grammar”of maps by observing what happens in effective foreign-language lessons. Stu-dents should be encouraged to practice the basic skills with well-designed mapsabout topics worth knowing. These activities help students acquire a stock ofmental maps of causally important information, which their brains can use to helpinterpret the spatial patterns, feature associations, analogic positions, and otherspatial relationships that they might perceive on new maps. It’s like learning howto learn!

KeywordsMap · Communication model · Spatial reasoning · Spatial pattern · Spatialassociation · Spatial analogy

Wake-Up Call: Remembering a Map of Africa

The Wake-up Call is a true story. When teachers see it in professional developmentworkshops, they usually react with an odd mix of recognition and astonishment –recognition that they have, in fact, seen something like this in their own classroomsand astonishment at how extreme it is, when stripped of extra details and shown on asingle page. The Wake-up Call has four short chapters:

• Chapter 1: The Viewing. Students in a college class watched several shortvideos and photo essays about African environments – savannas, rainforests,deserts, etc. They discussed possible human uses of these environments. Alongwith each viewing, the instructor projected an “ecoregion”map of Africa from thecourse textbook, with an animated dot to show the location of the photo or videothe students were viewing at the time.

• Chapter 2: The Assignment. At the end of the hour, the instructor projected themap again and urged the students to study it carefully, “at least once during theholiday break,” because it provides useful background for understanding a widerange of topics, including historic empires, present-day land use, and headlineissues such as malaria, desertification, Ebola, and even the locations of somerecent terrorist incidents.

• Chapter 3: The Quiz. Right after the holiday break, the instructor distributed ablank map of Africa with a simple oral instruction: “Draw lines on this map todivide Africa into 3–6 natural regions, and label each region with a few words orphrases to describe what it is like there.”

• Chapter 4: The Result. Figure 1 is a half-page handout, which the instructorused to start another discussion. The handout shows the textbook map, plus four

2 P. Gersmehl

student answers. To facilitate comparison, the answers were scanned, traced, andcolored with the colors that the textbook map used for the same general idea.

These maps clearly show that human brains find it hard to remember even arelatively simple thematic map accurately. This should be viewed as a major wake-up call for anyone who thinks that maps can automatically communicate durableinformation in textbooks, newspapers, or class presentations.

The question for this chapter is simple – can we figure out what happened andthen use that information to design more effective maps? In short, if there is a“language of maps,” can we learn from this experience to use it more effectively?

Mapping as Language

A map is an attempt to communicate, but is mapping a language? Let us assume it is(since an editor did put this paper in a book about language!), and ask a narrowerquestion: How is it similar to or different from other languages?

One difference is obvious. Languages have symbols (vocabulary) and syntax(rules of grammar), but the dimensions of verbal sentences and visual maps differ. Aword in a spoken or written language has a representational meaning plus a mean-ingful position in a chronological order. Symbols on maps also have representationalmeanings, but they can have two- to four-dimensional meanings: horizontal andvertical position plus extent in both dimensions. And an animated map can also have

EQUATOR

NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS IN AFRICA

ChaparralDesertGrasslandShrublandSavannahRainforest

Mountain (complex)DryHills

CattleFarms

Farms

Trees

Farming Cattle

Mountain

Desert

Trees

Forest

DesertHerding

Farming

Agriculture - coffee, cocoa

Desert UrbanForest

Herding

QUIZANSWERS

STUDY MAP

Fig. 1 Study map and student responses to a quiz 1 week later. (Scanned and colorized fromstudent responses in the author’s college Human Geography class)

Symbolics, Syntactics, and Semantics: Teaching a Language of Maps 3

dimensions of timing and duration. To show teachers how this can make mapreading different from verbal reading, our teacher-workshop agenda has a treasure-map “game” right after the African-environment Wake-up Call.

Encoding a Location on a Treasure Map

The projector shows a “map” of an imaginary room. Small rectangles represent nineidentical books on nine square tables that are also identical, except for their colors.After describing the location of the door and the observer, the instructor says that a$50 bill is hidden under the book on the table identified by a pointer on the screen(Fig. 2).

The teachers are asked to think silently for 15 s about how they will rememberwhere the “treasure” is. Then, they have 30 s to explain to each other what clue theyare using and to decide whether they chose the same clue.

The discussions often go longer than 30 s, because teachers sitting at the sametable rarely choose similar clues. After the class comes back together, the teachersassemble a list of ideas about how they might remember the location. After eachsuggestion, they “vote” with a show of hands.

Here are the five most common suggestions, with the numbers of votes they getfrom typical groups of 30 elementary or middle-school teachers:

Fig. 2 “Treasure Map” showing a treasure under a book on an orange table. (Screenshot from apresentation at many teacher workshops)

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“On the table near my right hand” – 2 or 3 out of 30.“On the orange table” – up to a third of the male teachers and more than half of the

female.“On the table in the middle of the front row” – a fifth of the group, more likely male.“Under the book in the front middle of its table” – another fifth, more likely younger.“On the middle table on the door side of the room” – up to a handful, and further

questioning often reveals that they come from schools with corridors that intersectat right angles, rather than a single long hallway.

Some other answer – between 0 and 3 in a typical group of 30.

The presentation then goes on to show the map of another room. This room alsohas nine books on nine tables, but the door is in a different place, and six of the tableshave numbers (Fig. 3).

The numbered tables are the six most frequently chosen by previous groups.Numbering them makes it easier for the teachers to talk about them. The group goesdown the list, and typically at least 4 of the numbered tables will be chosen by at least2 out of a typical group of 30 teachers. Then the location of the treasure is revealed –on table 6, where the book is in the same position on its table (upper right corner) asthe table is in the room. Out of about 800 teachers who participated in a workshopthat featured this activity, only 3 chose that one, and 2 of those were recent graduatesteaching an advanced placement class in high school.

The Wake-up Call and the Treasure Map offer a lot of raw data from which tomake inferences. Depending on the focus of the workshop and the time available, thediscussion with teachers can go several different ways from this juncture.

Fig. 3 Map of a similar room with a treasure hidden on one of six numbered tables. (Screenshotfrom a presentation at many teacher workshops)

Symbolics, Syntactics, and Semantics: Teaching a Language of Maps 5

Primary-School Maps and Children’s Atlases

If the group is mostly primary-school teachers, the next presentation has some mapsof Africa from a collection of elementary-school readers and atlases. Nearly all mapsin books intended for young children use the same map “vocabulary” – green and tancolors to show forest and desert, with small drawings of typical animals, plants, and/orbuildings (like the pyramids) placed in various locations on the map. Ask a group ofteachers how many have seen a map like that, and all hands are likely to go up. Thisleads to a loaded question: “If the college students had actually ‘learned’ an image ofAfrica from that map, would they have messed up the quiz so spectacularly?”

The presentation then zooms in on one of the maps, and the teachers are asked tothink about different ways in which students might encode the location of a smallpicture of a millet grain. (This symbol is located near Timbuktu, a trading center in amillet-based empire that might appear in a seventh grade World History class, andtherefore it is intuitively relevant for a teacher interested in building an appropriatefoundation for inquiry in a future class.)

Some children will remember the grain symbol as being “next to the gorilla” –that’s privileging the idea of proximity. In other words, table 1 in the second room!Others will remember “in the light green area” (color association, table 2), “betweenthe camel and the oil well” (sequential position, table 3), “in the north part ofNigeria” (analogic position within an enclosed area, a form of spatial hierarchy,table 4), and so forth.

In short, the children unconsciously use the same kinds of clues to help rememberthe location of something on a map that the adult teachers used to remember thelocation of the treasure in the table game. And, even more important, they have thesame potential for later confusion when they are asked to remember the location.

Actually, the potential for confusion starts even before they “go into the nextroom.” It happens because human brains are lazy – they seldom work any harderthan they have to. This is obvious when we watch young children doing a task with amap or classroom model.

Putting a Rug in a Classroom Model

Starting in 2007, a New York public school tried an “experiment.” The goal was touse ideas from modern learning theory to design mapping activities that would alsosupport reading and math objectives (especially good sources include Blades andCooke 1994; DeLoache et al. 1997; Dow and Pick 1992; Liben and Yekel 1996;Loewenstein and Gentner 2005; MacConnell and Daehler 2004; Newcombe andHuttenlocher 2000; Plumert and Spencer 2007; Tada and Stiles 1996; Uttal 2000;and the journals of national geography educators, especially the NCGE in the UnitedStates and the Geographical Association in the United Kingdom. Some results fromthat uncontrolled “experiment” have been reported in Gersmehl and Gersmehl 2011;some of the educational materials that were developed for the Harlem classes can bedownloaded from www.ourspatialbrains.com/primary-school-geography/).

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Here, let us focus on just one observation from that school. This observationoffers a useful insight into how young children view a map or model – in otherwords, how they process a message written in the language of maps.

For 5–15 min each day for about a week, the children had been adding informa-tion to a model of their classroom. This activity actually had a preliminary scaffoldactivity, in the form of a hand-sized rubber school bus that triggered a discussionabout models:

“What’s this?” “A school bus!”“It can’t be a school bus – a school bus is big; I can’t fit in this one; it doesn’t even have a door.”

Eventually, the teacher leads the students to agree that it’s amodel of a school bus.In other words, it represents a school bus – and the students now have two newwords for their weekly vocabulary list. (Those words also have obvious relevance intheir reading and math classes.)

The classroom model started as a big box with drawings of the classroomwindows taped to one inside wall of the box. One of the students’ first tasks wasto “turn the model so that it lines up with our room.” This simple but important taskhelped give children “ownership” of the model, as a representation of the room.

Over the next few days, the students added pieces of colored paper to the walls ofthe model to represent the greenboard, a poster, the alphabet, and other thingsattached to the walls in the classroom.

At first, the teachers presented symbols to the students, who debated only their location –“Here is a model of the greenboard; what wall should we put it on?”

Later, students got to choose symbols – “Here are two things that could represent ourdoor. Which one is better, and where should it go?”

Still later, the teachers brought in large letters – N, E, S, and W – and used them to “namethe walls in our room” and then had students put small versions of the letters in theirclassroom model.

Eventually, the students could suggest and debate the choice of symbols and then placethem on the appropriate walls on their model classroom.

(Note that each activity also had an explicit Language Arts component, such asmaking up a model sentence to describe the choice of symbol for the door. In effect,the teachers were capitalizing on the high interest in the model to address a LanguageArts objective that is often viewed with less interest.)

So far, the students have been doing tasks that reflect a child’s point of view, lookingsideways at a vertical wall in the classroom and in the model. The next group of shortactivities involved comparing and talking about points of view. These could use a blockwith different colors on its faces and small dolls to represent a dog and a bird.

Putting the dog on the table facing the block – “What color block does the doggie see?”Holding the bird above the block – “What color block does the birdie see?”

Symbolics, Syntactics, and Semantics: Teaching a Language of Maps 7

The goal was to get students to articulate that the color depends on the point ofview of the bird or the dog (Newcombe and Huttenlocher 1992). This can be adifficult concept at first, but a bird’s-eye view is crucial for understanding a map as arepresentation of the world.

Then came “rug day” – the day of the observation that is the topic of this entiresection.

Each classroom had a colorful rug where the children sit for story time. Theteacher held up a drawing of the rug, at appropriate scale, and asked students to putthe rug symbol “where it should go in the model of our classroom.” This was a high-interest activity. Students vied for the privilege of being the one to place the modelrug into the model classroom. Several teachers did a great job of putting students intogroups and having different groups place the rug without seeing how the others didit. This gave many more students a chance to solve the problem on their own.

The results are illuminating. In every room we observed, students wouldapproach the model and place the rug right in the middle – in some cases, high-fiving each other and smiling about a job well done. Several teachers noted this andlearned how to phrase a really important follow-up question: “Good job! But is therug really in the middle, or is it closer to the windows (or the greenboard, the E-wall,whatever is appropriate in a given classroom)?”

Hearing this, the students went back to the model and pushed the rug closer to thewall or corner where it was in the room. Observing the process, you could almost seetheir minds shift gears, moving from a simple enclosure perspective (“it’s inside theroom”) to a more complicated and accurate proximity perspective (“it’s inside the roomand closer to the greenboard wall”).

Neuroscientists now have a pretty good idea why this happens. It has to do withhow human brains process incoming visual information. And that, in turn, givesgreat insight into both the power and some limitations of a language of maps.

Parallel Networks for Processing Spatial Relationships

The Harlem students had at least two and sometimes three different ways of decidingwhere to put the rug in the model. In the workshops, 30 teachers often chose as manyas 5 or 6 different ways of remembering which table had the treasure under its book.Research, aided in recent years by brain-scanning technology, strongly suggests thathuman brains encode all of these possibilities, and more, at roughly the same time.They use parallel brain networks that are linked in complex ways with the primaryvisual cortex and the hippocampal area that interprets spatial relationships andconnects them with memory networks. Each brain network helps to organize spatialknowledge in a different way, by emphasizing relationships that are verbally cap-tured by terms such as proximity, enclosure, alignment, sequence, association,analogy, and so forth (Gersmehl and Gersmehl 2007; see also Anderson et al.2016; Cavina-Pratasi et al. 2010; Shigihara and Zeki 2014; Silson et al. 2013; andthe classic Rumelhart et al. 1987; for a similar perspective on reading verballanguages, see Coltheart et al. 1993; Dehaene 2009).

8 P. Gersmehl

The problem is that the condition we call “consciousness” is usually aware ofonly one of those “modes of spatial reasoning” at a time. There are good evolution-ary reasons why this is so, but the topic is very complicated, far beyond the scope ofthis chapter, and still quite controversial (Mashour 2018). Let us, therefore, tease outjust one idea that is relevant for a discussion of map language: many people,especially those well-versed in symbolic reasoning (like teachers!), can “push”their brains to switch to several different modes. This enhances their ability toretrieve and recall information from a map, but it also makes it much harder to doa rigorous inquiry about the process (e.g., with a brain scanner or an attempt todesign a test). Unfortunately, that difficulty has not stopped several journals frompublishing articles that feature elaborate statistical analyses of utterly misguided“tests” of spatial reasoning, tests that were based on the premise that one can design averbal or visual prompt that reliably engages the same network in every test taker’sbrain. (Note: no references are cited here – if the authors of those articles read thischapter, they should recognize themselves, and meanwhile the reader of this chaptershould remember the principle, not the names of authors of misguided and deeplyflawed research!)

Here is the principle, in three sentences. Human brains process incoming spatialinformation with multiple networks, some operating in a specific order and others inparallel, more or less at the same time. Depending on a complex mix of intention,genetics, prior knowledge, expertise, and the nature of the map itself, a person mayprivilege one or more of these networks. Because of this complexity, it is extremelydifficult, if not impossible, to design a test question that reliably engages the samenetwork(s) in every reader.

The actual research base for these three sentences is enormous – more than 4500relatively recent research reports in more than 300 professional journals, in a widerange of disciplines that includes neurobiology, vision science, cognitive and edu-cational psychology, architecture, linguistics, and even robot engineering, as well ascartography, geography, and geographic information systems. As in any rapidlyexpanding arena of inquiry, it is important to do a brute-force review, checking allabstracts, rather than trust a keyword search. (The search was aided by the spectac-ular University of Minnesota electronic library, plus four flights a month betweenMinneapolis and New York, and a dozen rides every week standing on New Yorksubways, where one could not use phones, laptops, newspapers, or even books ifthey required frequent page turns!)

A keyword search is not likely to find all important articles, because people indifferent disciplines often use different words or phrases to describe the same basicidea. For example, you might recall that the most common clue used by teachers inthe Treasure Map was the color of the table. Geographers call this a spatial associ-ation, a tendency for two features to occur together in the same places (likeAnopheles mosquitoes and malaria, to cite one highly relevant example – Fig. 4).Census researchers call this a correlation; some cognitive psychologists in the 1990scalled it a feature conjunction; robot engineers call it an environmental regularity;and the authors of one of the most important neuroscience articles called it statisticallearning. A keyword search using any of those terms is not likely to find the other

Symbolics, Syntactics, and Semantics: Teaching a Language of Maps 9

articles (and many more in other disciplines), even though they are all relevant to anunderstanding of how human brains and visual systems process a map (for a range ofperspectives, see Arguin and Saumier 2000; Dessalegn and Landau 2008; Elliffeet al. 2002; and especially Turk-Browne et al. 2008).

Moreover, the difficulties cited earlier make it unwise to draw a conclusion from asingle research study on any topic. For example, in 1 year, two groups of researchersreported opposite conclusions about feature conjunction in the same journal (Buck-ley and Gaffan 2006; Cate and Köhler 2006). For a short and already somewhatdated summary of 100 important research studies, see the Appendix to Chapter 6 inGersmehl 2014; other even older summaries are in Gersmehl and Gersmehl 2006,2007, 2011; I started another update in 2017 and then realized that I no longer hadthe “advantage” of the subway – a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests thatafter 6 years of just ordinary scholarly diligence, I am already at least 2700 articlesbehind, at the rate relevant articles had been appearing when I moved away fromNew York in 2012.

Despite these complications, one important take-home message is simple. Stu-dents do not just “get information” from a map (as many educational standards suchas the Common Core seem to assume; a copy can be downloaded from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/).

This message is especially true for the kind of map that is frequently used inprimary-school books and atlases. Those maps are prepared by contract cartogra-phers, not authors, and selected by a focus-group process that is similar to thelegendary Coke-vs-Pepsi blindfolded taste tests. Unfortunately, the kind of mapthat typically “wins” a publisher’s focus-group evaluation is the colorful one with

The dots showcommunities

that havemany casesof malaria

Which of these “itchy little critters” A.Anopheles, a kind of mosquito P. Phlebotomus, a kind of sand fleais most likely to be a carrier of malaria,the disease shown on the big map?

Identifying the Carrier of Malaria

A

P

Fig. 4 Using maps to help identify the vector of malaria. (Simplified from a student activity inwww.mi6thgradeclass.com)

10 P. Gersmehl

a swarm of attractive pictures on it: “Kids really like looking at this map.” Bothclassroom observation and academic research strongly suggest, however, that thiskind of map is not effective in communicating durable messages about eitherlocation or spatial patterns to young children. And the color map of ecoregionsthat is commonly used in textbooks can be just as ineffective, as demonstrated by thecollege students (and dozens of research articles).

To see why this happens, it might help to examine past efforts to construct amodel of the process of communication with the language(s) of maps. That enter-prise occupied the attention of academic cartographers for nearly half a century.

Models of Cartographic Communication

Maps can serve different purposes in ordinary life:

• Road maps (mall maps, golf course maps, etc.) are created to help guidemovement. People study them to identify their position in space and to choosea route toward a destination.

• Reference maps are made to store information about places. People study themto learn facts about a specific place in the world.

• Thematic maps are designed to communicate the geographic patterns of specifictopics (themes).

While noting the value of the first two kinds of maps, and the considerableamount of overlap between the categories, this chapter will focus on thematicmaps. These maps have the most flexible “languages” and therefore demand thegreatest attention to the linguistic principles of communication.

To paraphrase Canadian cartographer Len Guelke, a thematic map can conveytwo qualitatively different kinds of messages (Guelke 1977; for a semanticist’s takeon this topic, see Rescorla 2009). At a basic factual level, the map can tell you abouta specific condition (e.g., temperature, population density, predominant religion) at agiven place of interest. This is useful information, but a data table or verbaldescription can provide that kind of information more accurately and often moreeasily. The more important purpose of a thematic map is to convey a message aboutthe arrangement of features, their spatial pattern within an area, their associationswith other features, and their distance and direction from each other and from otherfeatures.

Confusion about the goal of the map may help us understand why the focus-groupprocess may be ineffective in selecting the most appropriate map for a textbook.People in a focus group tend to see the map in isolation, as a kind of stand-aloneaesthetic object to be evaluated. As a result, they are likely to focus on the attrac-tiveness of the map and the ease of decoding the symbols. Meanwhile, an educator ismore concerned with the ability of a map to communicate a clear message aboutrelative positions, overall geographic patterns, color and feature associations, andother spatial relationships.

Symbolics, Syntactics, and Semantics: Teaching a Language of Maps 11

Just like a prose writer has to balance precision of vocabulary against readabilityof paragraphs in choosing words, a thoughtful mapmaker has to weigh the clarity oflocal symbols against the salience of overall patterns in order to design a map foreducational purposes.

To make any map, the mapmaker must simplify the world, just like a writer has todecide what aspects of a big, complicated scene or event to describe in words. Then,the mapmaker chooses colors and symbols to represent specific features at specificlocations in the world. In the mid-twentieth century, cartographers began to thinkabout the process of mapping in terms of models based on the communicationmodels used in information theory at the time.

One early effort could be called the linear model of communication, whichdescribes a unidirectional flow of information through the processes of observation,encoding, decoding, and reconstruction (Fig. 5). This model has the twin virtues ofsimplicity and support for an important hypothesis, namely, that one can test theefficiency and effectiveness of map communication by comparing the originallandscape and the reconstructed image. This insight resulted in a modification ofthe model, bending a linear path into a nearly circular arc (Fig. 6).

Variations based on these two models provided a solid rationale for severaldecades of investigation into the effectiveness of different map projections, colorsequences, size gradations, type styles, dot placement, and other symbolic “vocab-ulary.” For example, if we want a map reader to perceive one circle on a map as twiceas large as another, we actually have to make it about 2.4 times as large, becausehuman perception of size is nonlinearly scaled (Flannery 1971; Gilmartin 1981).Other similar rules apply to topics such as color selection, gray shading, line widths,type size and orientation, and so forth (MacEachren 1995 is a good example amongmany summaries of this effort to develop a more scientific basis for map design;Kosslyn 1993 and 2006 are parallel summaries of principles for graph design, evenmore solidly rooted in vision science, psychology, and neuroscience). Severaldecades later, neuroscientists used brain scanners to find reasons for the nonlinearnature of perception and numerical cognition (Cohen-Kadosh et al. 2005; Dehaene2003; Longo and Lourenco 2007; Nieder and Miller 2005; Siegler and Opfer 2003).

After a few decades of examining the effectiveness of map symbols, however,researchers concluded that the psychophysics of perception could not predict the

REALWORLD MAPCartographer’s

ConceptionMap Reader’s

Conception

Fig. 5 A linear model of cartographic communication. (Redrawn from Robinson and Petchenik1975)

12 P. Gersmehl

response of every map reader with equal accuracy. Individual differences inmap-reading skills and strategies often resulted in different interpretations of thesame map. In effect, map readers often come to a map with a specific goal in mind,and that strategic intent can affect their map-reading tactics (Thorndyke and Stasz1979).

Others pointed out that we have no error-free way of recording the originallandscape. An enormous number of analysts and pundits have noted that if a verbaldescription would be adequate, a map would be unnecessary. Some kind of record ofthe “original landscape” is needed, but even a photograph is in an important sense aninterpretation of the landscape, not a completely objective record.

At the other end of the information pipeline, we also lack a reliable way of peeringinto the map reader’s mind to see the reconstructed image. If we ask a map reader toconstruct a map or verbal description of his or her interpretation of the first map, wehave just jumped on another loop of a never-ending spiral of interpretation, map-making, map reading, and reconstruction.

The next generation of map communication models tried to address some of theselimitations by adding various kinds of reverse pathways and feedback loops to themodel (Rossano and Morrison 1996; see also Fig. 7, from an introductory universitycourse called The Language of Maps, which was taught to more than 8000 studentsin the 1990s).

Kuhnian Revolutions in Academic Geography

While this discussion about communication models was continuing in the academicsubdiscipline of cartography, there were two revolutionary changes in the broaderdiscipline of geography. One was the rise of postmodern criticism of the role oflanguage, media, and totalizing narratives in the formation and maintenance of

REAL WORLD

Cartographer’sConception

Map Reader’sConceptionMAP

Cart o

grap

h iclan

guag

e

Cart o

gra p

hiclan

guag

e

Map maker’sreality

Map reader’sreality

Fig. 6 A circular model of cartographic communication. (Redrawn from Koláčný 1969)

Symbolics, Syntactics, and Semantics: Teaching a Language of Maps 13

Fig. 7 A feedback model of cartographic communication. (Redrawn from Gersmehl 1991)

14 P. Gersmehl

power structures within society. The other was the rapid development of computer-assisted information processing.

Cartography was not sheltered from either process.Postmodern critiques of cartographic practices rightly emphasized that a map is a

human attempt at communication, and it is more nuanced than just the mechanicaltransmission of facts about locations, conditions, and connections (Harley 1989).Ensuing discussions generally paralleled other postmodernist discourses about art,photography, poetry, and propaganda. This ground has been deeply plowed else-where, albeit too often with contumeliously obfuscatory procLAmations that nowseem almost quaint when read from the perspective of a citizen in the year 2018political era of social-media bots, alternative facts, and fake news!

That prose style, however, is at least partly a result of a process of expertisereversal that is the focus of the last part of this chapter. Here, let us just note that of arange of perspectives that extends around the alphabet from Sokal to Soja, the formernow seems more persuasive, and at least one oft-cited guru of the social-construc-tion-of-reality crowd has in essence recanted, appalled by how some of his state-ments have been (mis)used (Soja 1989; Sokal and Bricmont 1998; de Vrieze 2017).

And with that, let us go on to look, equally briefly, at the role of digital technologyin the language of maps.

The Role of Geospatial Information Systems

Early experiments in computer-aided mapping added some new stakeholders to thecartographic arena, as a wide range of people in public agencies and privatecompanies quickly realized its value as an accurate and inexpensive way to storeand display all of their laboriously compiled and updated records of the locations of(and spatial relationships among) supply sources, warehouse inventories, truckroutes, water mains, electric wires, sewer pipes, property lines, and so forth (oh,and military targets!).

Early computer maps, drawn on line printers, were almost spectacularly clunky.Today, critics note the opposite problem, namely, that the glossy animated mapdisplays in phones, display screens, and virtual-reality headsets have become solifelike that they mask all of the algorithms and processing steps that intervenebetween the real world and the display of, for example, the location of a newrestaurant and the route that you should take to get from your house to it.

Any of these topics – business inventory mapping, government agency infra-structure mapping, GPS-enabled route mapping, consumer locational assistance,virtual-reality displays, military threat assessment, etc. – would deserve an entirechapter. Constraints of space and expertise, however, point us toward a muchnarrower topic: the use of map languages to instruct children (and, by extension,adults) about the features in the world that a citizen might wish to know.

Symbolics, Syntactics, and Semantics: Teaching a Language of Maps 15

Map Comparison: Using Maps to Discern/Describe SpatialAssociations

As noted before, it is a limiting trap to view a map primarily as a repository ofinformation about a specific place. Psychologist David Uttal says that this view ofmap communication is like looking at a line graph in order to find a single number,like the population of China in the year 1990. This information is of course useful,but we can get that kind of fact from a data table; the real message of a line graph isabout the trend through time, the rate of change, and how that compares with whathappened in other countries.

The same principle applies to maps. The unique value of a thematic map is itsability to help us compare features in one place with other places, to see how theplaces are connected, and to note regional clusters, gradients, associations with otherfeatures, and analogies with other places, in short, to aid in doing all of the variousmodes of spatial reasoning that were listed earlier, when we were looking at aTreasure Map or the Wake-up Call about Africa. In each case, the prior presenceof a good collection of mental maps of important geographic phenomena makes itmuch easier to interpret a new map of some feature of interest. Dubbed the MatthewEffect (“to those who already have much, more shall be given”), this has been widelyrecognized in both the narrow field of cartography and the broader field of literacy ingeneral (Gregg 1999; Pfost et al. 2014).

The Matthew Effect has enormous implications for the design of media maps andfor the development of curricular materials for elementary and secondary schools.For one thing, it calls into question the conventional first chapter or series of lessonplans about map skills. In the old days, those chapters and lesson plans tended tofocus on projections, scale, color conventions, and categories of symbols. Thetreatments were often abstract, and students rightly dissed them as boring andseemingly irrelevant.

The pendulum has swung to a different extreme in many modern textbooks andcourse outlines, which often try to teach map skills by using maps of supposedly“child-friendly” topics such as UFO sightings, heroic battles, zombie invasions, orthe geographic patterns of preference for different brands of soft drink. These topicsmay indeed grab attention, but at the end of the day, the student has gained littlefactual knowledge to aid in interpreting other maps. Moreover, these activities cancommunicate a subliminal message that maps (and geographic analyses in general)are about trivial things – sort of a Jeopardy-game view of geographic understanding.

A more desirable approach is to teach map skills as they are needed, in the contextof a well-structured sequence of intuitively important problems that students try tosolve. One can help novice students with this inquiry by carefully designing coherentpackages of maps, graphs, and text. Since students will be spending a lot of timeinteracting with these maps, they are likely to retain better memories of the details oftheir spatial patterns (if the maps are well designed and students are guided to doeffective kinds of map reading – see below). In short, maps that are used to teachmap skills in the early years of school should be chosen not just for their

16 P. Gersmehl

effectiveness in teaching the map skill but also for their usefulness in comparing withother maps in the future.

This can be illustrated with an example that links directly with the Wake-up Callabout African environments at the beginning of this chapter.

The example starts with the assumption that the optimum time to start learningsome languages of mapping is at the same time as the formal verbal and mathemat-ical languages – in other words, in primary and elementary schools. Longtimeobservers of American education will note that these are precisely the educationalsettings where topics like geography, history, science, and the visual arts have beensqueezed out of days that are increasingly devoted to direct instruction in the readingand math topics that are the focus of standardized tests – but this, too, is a huge topic,which does not fit into this chapter without taking up the rest of the space. So let usjust rue the wrongheadedness of that approach and proceed with a description of acomposite school, one that includes a total of nine first-grade classrooms from publicschools in Harlem, an immigrant neighborhood of Queens, New York, and two smalltowns in rural northern Michigan.

In first grade, teachers and students read a story about animals together. Thesuggested story is about camels, for two reasons – camels are “fun” (they chewsideways, sound like Chewbacca, and spit at people they don’t like), and theirgeographic pattern is worth knowing. Teachers could also choose stories about gorillas,giraffes, lions, kangaroos, or polar bears, but we do not recommend stories aboutpenguins, chipmunks, rats, cockroaches, or any other animal whose geographic patternis either hard to generalize or not very useful in interpreting other maps. In short, oneshould apply the same criteria to learning a language of maps that foreign-languageteachers use in choosing vocabulary for a reading exercise – namely, how useful arethese specific “words” in a dual role as illustrations for a grammar skill right now and asbits of knowledge that can add to a vocabulary base that is useful for future learning?

After reading the story, a teacher might point to a camel symbol on the kind ofcolorful pictorial map described earlier, but only to inform the student that this kindof map is not very useful in answering real questions about camels. The teacher thenhands out a very simple but carefully designed thematic map, and the students do avery specific map skill with it (Fig. 8).

In this case, the skill is to draw a line around a bunch of symbols in order to groupthem into a region and then to make a verbal description of that region: for example,“Camels like to live in a big area in the northern part of Africa.” To succeed in thisprocess, of course, students need to learn two separate skills: how to draw around abunch of symbols and what “north” means on a map. A well-planned curriculumshould therefore include a series of prior lessons in which students make an ever-more-complex model of something intuitively relevant, such as their classroom in awooden box (Remember our Harlem kids? Fig. 9 has two examples of their roommodel, and one of their activities was to identify the desk “region” of their room bystretching a string around the purple boxes in the model).

Naming the walls of their classroom is a good first step, and it has the side benefitof being useful for some kinds of classroom management. For example:

Symbolics, Syntactics, and Semantics: Teaching a Language of Maps 17

Task: Draw a line around the general areawhere you think camels like to live.

THE CAMEL REGION OF AFRICA

Important: The process of regionalization must be modeled and taught. It is not intuitively obvious to everyone!

Describe the location of the camel region.Use direction and position words.

Camels

Camels

“I think camels like to livein the northern one-third of Africa.They do not live near the equator.”

SAMPLE ANSWER

Fig. 8 Identifying the “camel region” in Africa. (Simplified from a student activity developed forthe Michigan Geographic Alliance)

Building a Classroom Model - Step by Step

Screenshots from a 75-frame training presentation to help teachers lead studentsin building a classroom model that is a solid foundation for future mapping activities.

Fig. 9 Building a classroom model. (Photo of a classroom model used in teacher workshops atColoma, Michigan)

18 P. Gersmehl

Line up along the north wall so we can walk to the library.

The wall names can also be used for stand-up games, like:

Simon says all girls should turn to face the east wall.

After watching good teachers make use of ideas like these, it is hard to avoid asimple conclusion: people are not “born with” a sense of direction. It is much moreaccurate to say that some people gain a better sense of direction by being raised infamilies and taught in classrooms where direction was a meaningful construct at thetime when certain brain networks were developing links with other networks (forthree perspectives on this enormous topic, see Cornell et al. 2003; McNaughton et al.1991; Prestopnik and Roskos-Ewoldsen 2000).

The point of both the direction games and the camel read-along is to help build asolid foundation for future inquiry. In this case, drawing a boundary around a groupof camels in primary school (and describing their “region”) becomes a useful schemathat can help students learn from other maps in the future, e.g., maps of Arab andBerber nomads in a World Cultures class, of deserts in a World Geography class, andof the spread of Islam in a World History class. At the scale of the continent ofAfrica, maps of these topics are essentially identical (Fig. 10).

Elephants Arabic Languages

IslamMalaria

CAMELS AND OTHER THINGS IN AFRICA

Which three things are geographicallylike the camels shown on the big map, and which three things are different?

Camels

Fig. 10 Camels and other things in Africa. (Simplified from a student activity developed for theMichigan Geographic Alliance)

Symbolics, Syntactics, and Semantics: Teaching a Language of Maps 19

To facilitate the deliberate linking of inquiries in different grades, the MichiganGeographic Alliance has prepared a suite of “clickable”maps of major world regions(these are currently accessible at ss.oaisd.org/big-ideas-clickable-maps.html). Eachof these electronic maps has about 30 layers of information that can be turned on oroff as desired. The layers on the Africa clickable include maps of camels, ecoregions,fires, languages, religions, trade routes, and colonial claims, among other topics.

The purpose of these maps is to allow easy comparison of a carefully selected setof features that are spatially associated because they have a common causal influence(an inductive category of spatial patterns; see Pinker 1999). In Africa, a very strongcausal influence is latitude; in South America, the Michigan Geographic Alliance-designated “Big Idea” is elevation; in China, population density; in Australia,distance; and so forth.

This effort is worth describing in some detail because its goal is to constructcurricula that deal with mapping as a multi-stranded language, in which individualsymbols do not just represent features at places, but taken together can also com-municate geographic patterns, spatial associations of features, analogical relation-ships, and other spatial concepts. This puts this kind of cartography in a differentbasket from a whole swarm of electronic maps designed as media for the storage anddelivery of facts about specific places (“roll your pointer over the Taj Mahal to getthe year it was built”).

A “different basket,” however, is an overlapping category, not a superior group ora replacement. None of this discussion is intended to downplay the value of maps asrepositories of facts about places. Computers have made this role much easier,because “interactive” symbols can bring up a data display when the user movesthe pointer over a symbol. Figure 11 is a useful public-domain example – it has aswarm of pictorial symbols that are visually similar to the children’s map of Africadescribed above, but with two big differences. First, the overall spatial pattern ofenergy facilities is less important than the detailed associations with features such aswater bodies or population centers at a local scale. To facilitate this analysis, the mapsoftware allows the user to zoom in on any area of interest. Second, the nature of thatlocal association is greatly influenced by the specific details about the energyproduction or transmission facility. For this reason, the map is designed so thatwhen the pointer highlights a symbol, a small page on information about a specificpower plant or other energy facility appears on the screen (Fig. 11).

Financial websites feature similar graphs of things like stock-market prices.Moving the pointer to a specific position on the graph causes the price at a specifictime to pop up. In both cases, the viewer gets a general impression of relationships aswell as the ability to uncover more information about any small part of the overalldisplay. In that respect, it is similar to an online translation program that offers ageneral translation of a sentence or paragraph into another language, plus the abilityto place the pointer over a specific word and get alternative translations that are

20 P. Gersmehl

linked in the semantic memory of the program and might therefore be appropriate atsome times. The difference, as noted earlier, is that both the horizontal and verticalpositions and extent are important parts of the message of a graph or a map.

In all cases, the value of the specific information is enhanced if the reader knowshow to read the entire map or graph, like a surrounding paragraph, to gain context. Ina nutshell, that is the purpose of a map, which uses a culturally conventionalsymbolic “vocabulary” and “syntax” to communicate a multi-stranded messageabout local facts and spatial relationships over a larger area.

One spectacularly good example of this kind of map is the “number of residents”part of The New York Times Immigration Explorer. This online map uses carefullychosen colors, carefully stacked scaled circles, and carefully arranged sliders tocreate an easily analyzed display of national patterns for any census year orcensus-identified source country. It also allows the user to zoom in on smallerareas and to slide the pointer over any individual county to get information for thatcounty (https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/03/10/us/20090310-immigration-explorer.html?_r=).

Fig. 11 Information about the Monroe coal-fired power plant. (Source: US Energy InformationAdministration, June 2018; US government open data policy)

Symbolics, Syntactics, and Semantics: Teaching a Language of Maps 21

Conclusion: Becoming an Expert Map Reader

A map is a spatially organized arrangement of visual or tactual symbols that areintended to be decoded, analyzed, and interpreted (Muehrcke 2005).

Compared with a novice, an expert map reader is able to use more different modesof spatial reasoning and to apply those schemas more effectively (Harel et al. 2010;Bar 2007). Moreover, the expert also already has “memorized” a wider range ofmental maps that can be compared with the patterns, gradients, associations, sym-metries, and other arrangements that can be seen on a given map. As a result, theexpert is able to gain more information from the map, in a much shorter period oftime, than the novice can.

What experts are not able to do, in many cases, is explain to a novice what theyare doing in order to gain information from the map. This, of course, is a pervasiveproblem in all domains of human knowledge. It’s like walking down a flight of stairs– if you do it often enough that the task becomes routine, and then someone asks youto explain how you are moving your legs, or even if you just think about it while youare walking, it slows you down. In short, the kinds of metacognitive clues that arehelpful to a novice in any field – map reading, chess playing, welding, foreign-language learning, or even stair climbing – can often interfere with an expert’sefficiency in the situation (Downs and Liben 1991; Kalyuga et al. 2003; Lee andKalyuga 2011; Rey and Buchwald 2011; Veenman and Elshout 1999).

The path to map-reading expertise is easy to describe, but it takes time andguidance to accomplish: use the skills of spatial reasoning often enough, with avariety of useful maps, that the skills and the encoded information become routineschemas that can be applied without conscious thought. This lets you preserveattention for the relationships that emerge as a result of different kinds of spatialanalysis. In this respect, map reading is like any other language. We have to“overlearn” the vocabulary and the details of grammar and syntax and in effectturn them into unconscious schemas, and then we can apply our full attention to thesemantic meaning of a text. What makes map reading different from “sentential”languages is that part of the syntax consists of the multidimensional spatial relation-ships among things of the map (see Guelke 1977; Rescorla 2009).

One Last Example, from a 2018 Geography Journal

Imagine a table of data about a controversial topic like forcible evictions from rentalproperty. The table itself is not likely to suggest any hypotheses about causation(though, in time, a diligent researcher or an artificial intelligence might be pro-grammed to tease out and evaluate some plausible possibilities).

22 P. Gersmehl

A human analyst, however, might display the data on a map in order to inspect thespatial arrangement of the addresses of evicted individuals and families. A novicelooking at that map might apply a fairly simple form of reasoning, like counting dotsand concluding that there are a lot of evictions in one part of the map. Meanwhile, thepattern of dots might trigger a sense of recognition in the expert: “it looks likesomething else I’ve seen before.” In that sentence, “looks like” can mean that thedots are located in the same general area, have a similar directional gradient, arebunched or spread out in a similar way, and so forth. In other words, the expert infersthat the feature of interest is organized according to one or more of the spatialschemas that seem to be at least partly hardwired into human brains (and were usedto remember the location of the treasure in the room with nine tables – see Gattis2001).

The expert map reader might then compare the spatial arrangement of otherfeatures that might be causally related to the observed evictions. In this particularcase, the comparison led to the conclusion that a very high percentage of theevictions occurred within a few blocks of the stops on a proposed public transitsystem, even though that system served only a small fraction of the area of the city(Maharawal and McElroy 2018).

This topic, of course, is part of a complicated social-justice issue that involvesgentrification and tax laws that privilege passive real estate investment income ascapital gains. In short, the geographic pattern of evictions turns out to be a symptomof a process that seemed to be transferring wealth to those who already have powerand privilege. A language of maps, therefore, turns out to be one of the tools thathumans can use to help unravel these causal associations and move toward a morejust society.

This is true, if we are able to use the language to communicate more than just“there was an eviction at this address.”

One Last Point, Do Map Projections Cause Misperceptions?

Map projections don’t matter as much as some people think, because we don’tremember sizes or shapes very well anyway – if we did, we would have to wasteanother big bunch of brain neurons remembering grandma’s new face every time sheturned or tilted her head or moved a little closer or farther away. Just as we learn howto remember her face without actually remembering its size or exact shape, we do thesame thing with buildings and billboards and bathrooms and North America on maps(Fig. 12).

Symbolics, Syntactics, and Semantics: Teaching a Language of Maps 23

Fig. 12 Map projections and misperceptions

24 P. Gersmehl

Publisher’s note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims inpublished maps and institutional affiliations.

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