Lab 1: Map Critique

This weeks lab's expectation was to apply the classes lecture, GIS 4006: Computer Cartography, by selecting and evaluation a well and poorly designed maps. Applying the knowledge gained from the lecture below are my critiques, starting with the well designed map.

Well Design Map

Figure 1: Well Designed Map

As illustrated in Figure 1, the selection of the well-designed map was based solely on the intricacy of the author's legend. The thoughtful design of the legend, including the choice of color palette and the aggregated 'Other' category, minimized the cognitive effort needed to extract valuable information. In a perceptive move, the author aggregated ancestries that did not represent significant geographical areas into an 'Other' category, thereby reducing the color palette by nine. This single decision significantly improved the map's overall usability. Notably, the author did not exclude valuable information about the 'Other' ancestry, but incorporated a textual description that showed the corresponding US County, thereby accommodating users interested in those specific locations.

Poor Design Map

Figure 2: Poor Designed Map

The selection of this map was solely an exercise devised to remind myself to, as much as possible, exclude the influence of the "mind's eye" when evaluating my own work. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been extensively working with tropical cyclone data from the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS). It's easy for me to make assumptions given the depiction in Figure 2, but in the absence of this contextual (mind's eye) information, the map fails on a number of levels.

The first issue is that the map does not stand on its own, meaning that one cannot draw a definitive conclusion from this figure alone. If the map had included critical elements such as a title or a legend, it might have been possible to discern its contents. However, the chosen temporal extent reduces the map to a confusing tangled spaghetti.