Eye-tracking in Cognitive Cartography
General, External sources ·Lecture given by Dr. Stanislav Popelka, Palacký University Olomouc
The interdisciplinary nature of Cartography and the drivers of innovation
Going into this talk I had no idea what cognitive cartography was. I certainly was not expecting it to be as interdisciplinary as it is. It seems like it would be a very niche field, and it is to some extent, but the fields it pulls from and can be applied to are innumerable. Dr. Popelka’s research utilized methods and information from fields as varied as biology, psychology, and design. And the list of he shared of different applications for his work was enormous, ranging from marketing to human-computer-interaction to medicine. His lecture reminded me of the reason I decided to pursue cartography.
As Dr. Popelka emphasized, cartography and geoinformatics are fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature, and that is the reason I feel in love with the field. But more than that, Dr. Popelka’s work highlighted that cartography is fundamentally about communication. His focus on the importance of usability in maps reminded me of one of the first lessons I ever learned in a cartography class: no matter how pretty the map is, if it does not fulfill its purpose, if it does not convey the information it is meant to, it is a bad map plain and simple. As I have continued my studies and become more and more specialized, I have gotten increasingly caught up in the minutiae of techniques and lost sight of the greater purpose of geoinformatics and cartography. This lecture felt like a much-needed call to come back to the basics of cartography, a reminder as to why we make maps.
We create maps because they are meant to communicate something to us, they are meant to give context or help us navigate or preserve a place. Maps serve us and thus the field of map making grows as our needs grow. One of my favorite parts of the lecture was when Dr. Popelka provided a bit of background on the development of the field of cognitive cartography discussed how the field began to develop in the 1960s as a result of the increased interest in aerial image interpretation due to the cold war. I was once again reminded not only of how political situations can drive technological innovation (as was the case with GPS) but also of the fact that cartography is not just a fluffy design tool but also an invaluable analytical tool. Cartography can reveal things other methods of investigation cannot. The purpose of cartography is not just to make something beautiful but to make something that can reveal and communicate what words and raw numbers cannot.