Cake Wrecks features another map cake in today’s post. Click the picture to see all of the other great election themed cakes showcased in the original post.

If you can’t get enough of map cakes, check out this post and this post.

For your Friday enjoyment, here is a motivational poster I created for Tom Vought (@TomVought) and Elliot Hartley (@elliothartley) the other day. Tom had been worried that he was going to spend his day watching ArcMap’s progress bar, which had been at 0% for some time. The processing task he was performing had to do with a selection on census blocks. At one point he mused that he should work in a state that has fewer census blocks, to make his job easier.

I pointed out that there are times when Arc will appear to be working,  saying “0%”, but it’s actually crashed or is in some way not doing what was expected. He replied, “I think it’s working.”

“I think it’s working” is an apt mantra for the GIS analyst profession in general, and thus the poster was made. I thought I could try to run a process myself in order to get a screen capture of the 0% bar but when I loaded up a project serendipity played in my favor and gave me a spinning wheel when I right-clicked on a layer’s properties, thus the picture of the Cache tab with nothing on it. By the way: Tom tweeted an update 28 hours later to say that his task was 50% complete.

Amazing maps, how sweet the sound,





That saved a GISer like me.


We once were lost






but now we’re found,





Was blind,





but now, we see.

 
August is a good time to put aside some of our serious map-making dogma in favor of lighter material. To that end, why not head over to poetrykit.org to read some of Jim Bennett’s “the cartographer” poems? You’ll read such gems as:

to show his great skill to his visitors; the cartographer; shaved his dog. . .

and

. . . the gentle eyelash an isthmus

Don’t just read these two excerpts. You really must read all the poems and enjoy a good laugh this Wednesday afternoon.
 

Over lunch the other day I was re-reading parts of a book for the third time. This particular book happens to be a relatively famous one in the world of design, by an author with a large following, who’s often cited, and who has many books published. It was my third time reading that chapter, but the first time doing so in-depth. I realized, with this close reading, that the chapter didn’t actually finish its point. It started with a thesis that I was eager for it to resolve and it never did. Oh sure, there was a lot of interesting material in there, with a lot of ideas on how to do things, but it never came to the point!

As an author, noticing other authors screw up is like kind of like a lawyer feeling better when they note another lawyer making a bad argument.

Of course, one mustn’t forget what Stephen King supposedly said: “If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I’m impressed.”

There are some books that are just completely perfect. The one I can think of off the top of my head is Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton, which is just an outstanding visual and intellectual treat, not to mention a heck of a teaching tool.

Note: Writing about books is all I’ve got for now, folks. It’s just been “books, books, and more books” on the brain over in my office, as all mapping related stuff has been pushed aside for a while. Focusing on getting Cartographer’s Toolkit out has been a long and winding road. The most recent challenge is figuring out just why Amazon is listing it as “Usually ships in 1 – 3 weeks” when it should be readily available. Hopefully the internets are right in that this particular bump will smooth out after a few weeks of sales, thus providing Amazon enough data to make them order enough stock to meet demand.

The Harvard Business Review ran an article this month** about a study that shows that in educational environments, textbooks where the text is written in an uncommon font, especially a hard-to-read font, are providing better retention of the material than textbooks written in traditional fonts. The theory is that these fonts make the reader work harder, and in so doing, the reader remembers the material more. Perhaps the effort that we take in comprehending something is positively correlated with ability to remember that information. This makes sense.

Now let’s just take this to what you might be guessing is my logical, although potentially quite fallable, follow-on idea: maybe maps that are hard to read, that are so awful that they make the map reader really study them just to get some basic understanding out of them, increase the map reader’s ability to remember their content?

Now, the fear with this idea, and with the textbook study as well, is that if something is hard to read, a casual audience may just skip it completely rather than try to decipher it. This would be especially true when the material is not something that the reader, or map reader, is expecting to be tested on.

However, we might want to experiment with some variables in map design to see if it holds true. Cartography thesis anyone? The obvious variables to test would be maps with garish colors, or hard to distinguish colors; hard to read fonts on the labels; or confusing line work that overlaps and intersects. Hey, maybe there’s a use for this map afterall!

*I’m not seriously suggesting you make bad maps, people! It’s just an idea for further exploration.
**Hard-To-Read Fonts Promote Better Recall, Harvard Business Review