Six years after publishing the second edition of his acclaimed essay “How to lie with maps” M.S. Monmonier presents in a Statistical Science paper additional examples of how cartography inevitably suffers from distortions. The paper covers the effects of map scale (for example, the stretching and flattening of the earth curvature into a map means that the real length represented by an inch can vary widely in different places); map symbols (for example symbols with a finite width such as political areas take up a lot of space on a large scale map and encourages the mapmaker to push aside other elements) and data classification (where the mapmaker lets software take the lead without delving into the data). The paper looks both at geographical and statistical maps.
Distortions occur, Monmonier says, because much of the reality that maps represent has to be suppressed in favour of clarity. And with the explosion of software for mapmaking, and well-meaning software engineers and mapmakers not sufficiently skilled in cartography, the scope for distortion has possibly increased.
While pointing out that lying with maps is quite different to lying with statistics, Monmonier hails Darrell Huff, author of How to Lie with Statistics (see my post HUFF, D. (1954) How to lie with statistics) as the inspiration for his own almost-name-sake 1996 essay. As Scott Kruse (1992) states in a review of Lying with Maps (2005): “what Huff has done for statistics, Monmonier has done for cartography”
References
‘Lying with Maps’ Statistical Science. Vol. 20, No. 3, p. 215–222
Information Distortion 