Getting it Right

In my last posting, the basic form of the new maps was decided and I had gathered a fair amount of basic information that could be available.  The next big step is rectifying and justifying all the competing and contradictory data.  The big secret of maps is, despite all the great information they contain and the comprehensive manner in which that information is presented, there are often many inaccuracies in every one of them.  Usually, their main focus is quite correct.  That is, nautical maps usually get the water stuff right.  Road maps get the streets correct.  Don’t try and dock your boat using a road map!  The requirements of making a legible map mean that each mapmaker often has to show things which are outside the main focus and expertise of their specific interest.  You can easily see this in a road atlas.  Often a road will literally end in the water and then make a turn back onto the land.  The road is usually correct but the mapmaker couldn’t be bothered to correct the landform background beneath the street line.  It wasn’t critical to his product.  But someone looking at the map knows it is not right!  This is a very simplistic example but it is a significant deficit of many maps.  Just gathering material from all these different sources points up numerous discrepancies which should be fixed.  After all, the expectation of a map is that it is a faithful representation of reality.  If two maps disagree on what they are showing, they can’t both be correct.  And viewers, even non-experts, have a visceral reaction to seeing something that strikes them as wrong.  It flies in the face of what they know and it draws strong reactions.  Conversely, I’ve often observed when viewers do carefully explore an area that they are familiar with and find it to be representative of their own experience, they nod appreciatively and satisfactorily and often purchase the map.  Despite the artistic nature of my work, the “getting it right” part is still basic to describing what I do as “making maps”.  This part of the process is no small portion of the initial work.  No one wants a “bad” map.  It’s counterintuitive and puts people off.