Weary Mappers

CONCLUSION
The importance of Geographic Information Science, the
new research !eld behind the technology and application
of Geographic Information Systems, is fully acknowledged,
especially as it incorporates sub-!elds critical to New
Cartography. But sections of the GIScience community
seem unaware of the full signi!cance of cartography’s
ancient and instinctive nature, or of the radical changes,
from its paper-based past, which have taken place in recent
decades.12 Just as cartography benefited from, and continues
to absorb developments in, GISystems and the
Internet, GISystems have also bene!ted greatly from
fundamentally cartographic concepts. However, many which
have prevailed until recently, derive from the 1960s and
70s. Important cartographic advances of the past three
decades have been largely ignored. Spatial representation is
the unifying element of GIScience (URL 4) and cartography,
as now defined, could be regarded as integral to
that science.
Although restricted physically to the production of static,
symbolic and optimal13 maps to support their investigations,
innovative users of cartography in the past imagined
much more than they could ever create. Their cognitive
realms offered animated visualizations of landscapes or
data-sets, realistic or simpli!ed according to the project in
hand, but these could not be created externally at that
time. The dynamic, detailed, task-centred and interactive
facilities of today need not, in the author’s view, represent
some radically ‘new’ subject. This is just ‘cartography’
enhanced (yet again) by new technologies and thinking.
More importantly it represents a cartographic revolution —
the dynamic and interactive convergence of our instinctive
cognitive powers with the ‘outside world’ of geospatial
data. Current international geovisualization studies include
the examination of how visualization can contribute to all
aspects of the geoscienti!c process.14 This paper, based on
a review of the instinctive nature of mapping and the
evolution of cartography (especially during the last decade),
could be associated with these. The model presented, of
‘using cartography’ holistically, has always been applied
by humans in spatial problem-solving. Today, however,
technology has broadened its scope and effectiveness.
While sharing origins and interests, those within cartography
and the other GISciences should keep to their

unique approaches and programmes of research while still
maintaining open lines of communication between them.
Increased opportunities to discover innovative solutions
to the problems of our planet should be the result. This
is the long-term hope of the International Cartographic
Association (URL 5) as it embarks on a new era rede!ned as
‘The International Society for Cartography and Geographic
Information Science’.