Mark Monmonier Quotes

Nowadays, when I confess to being skeptical about theory, I'm especially concerned that proponents of social criticism of cartography don't really seem to be very committed to communication. They litter their essays with elitist language, which I don't think takes anybody, except maybe them, further down the road toward understanding.

Has cartography become GIS? It's a moot point. I guess a lot of people in the GIS arena wouldn't agree that what they are doing is cartography. There's also the annoying tendency among academics to rename things, as occurred when we went from geographic information systems to geographic information science, to geospatial technologies, a term that acknowledges that the important role of GPS and what's called `location-based services'. If you look beyond GIS, you'll see a wider enterprise in which GIS as we know it now (mostly buffering and map overlay) is a relatively small part of macrocartography. But I don't have a crystal ball.

Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it is essential. To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or screen, a map must distort reality.

Publication of my commentary in the Communications from Readers section might be one way for The American Cartographer to affirm a commitment to openness, and to demonstrate once again that efforts to stifle dissenting opinion tend to backfire.

Such a critique seems trivial insofar as it's the situation that makes a technology good or bad. Plumbing is good when it solves an otherwise messy public health problem, for instance, and bad when it facilitates Nazi gas chambers. Of course, we need to critique the use of geospatial technologies. And we also need to critique the critique of geospatial technology.

I have made no secret that I am stepping down principally because of a strong disagreement with those now in control of ACSM over the importance to the profession of federal personnel qualifications standards which recognize the value of a comprehensive cartographic education to those accepting the title and responsibilities of Cartographer. But I have few regrets for having worked with The American Cartographer since 1977....

Whenever a map of count data makes sense, perhaps to place a map of rates in perspective, graphic theory condemns using a choropleth map because its ink (or toner) metaphor is misleading.

No one can use maps or make maps safely and effectively without understanding map scales, map projections, and map symbols.

A final caveat: because this book is intended for general readers, academic geographers will notice little reference here to poststructural critical theorists, who've said much about maps in recent years but little about toponyms. Simply put, I've not found their work particularly useful, especially when tedious regurgitation of Foucault crowds out case studies and fosters gratuitous assumptions about power and impact.

Although cartographic journals have been rigorously reviewing software for nearly a decade, the profession today seems as powerless against stupidly designed software as it was against the flagrant misuse of the Mercator projection.