History
Although this was a postwar discovery, the Map Communication Model (MCM) has its roots in information theory developed in the telephone industry before the war began. Mathematician, inventor, and teacher Claude Shannon worked at Bell Labs after completing his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940. Shannon applied mathematical theory to information and demonstrated that communication could be reduced to binary digits (bits) of positive and negative circuits. This information could be coded and transmitted across a noisy interface without losing any meaning. Once the information was received it was then decoded by the listener; the integrity of the information remained intact. In producing meaningful sounds that could be measured for quality, Shannon produced the beginning of information theory and digital communication through circuits of on and off switches.
Shannon developed his ideas more thoroughly in the 1940s at the same time that geographer and cartographer Arthur H. Robinson returned from the Second World War during which he had served as cartographer for the military. Robinson found that cartographers were significantly limited because artists could make more effective maps than geographers. Upon returning from the war, Robinson worked to remedy this problem at Ohio State University where he was a graduate student. His The Look of Maps emphasizes the importance of lettering, map design, map structure, color, and technique.
Information theory helped turn the map into a medium of communicating information. Although Robinson never articulated a map model that could govern the new scientific pursuit of maps, his role in the war led to an understanding of the practical need for maps based on science not art. Robinson opened the door for others to apply Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication to the design of maps. British geographer Christopher Board developed the first MCM in 1967 but it was cumbersome and poorly measured a map’s information quality. The Czech Geographer Kolácný’s 1969 version made several key improvements to Board’s model. These versions of the MCM helped cartographers realize the problems that Robinson noted as a war cartographer and helped articulate the discipline in terms of science.
Read more about this topic: Map Communication Model
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)