Analytical Cartography UC Santa Barbara （分析地图学加州大学圣芭芭拉分校）.pdfVIP

Analytical Cartography † W. R Tobler In the late 1960’s a new course, entitled Analytical Cartography, was introduced into the geography program at the University of Michigan. It is the purpose of this talk to explain some of the motivation for this course and to illustrate some of the content by a selection of examples. In such a short lecture it is naturally not possible to cover all of the details, but some of the flavor may be suggested. An understanding of the situation in geographical cartography in the United States in the early years of the decade, as I perceived it, is helpful as a background. Cartography has been a university subject in the United States since the late thirties of this century. Of the 3,000 or so colleges in the United States, cartography is taught in most of those which offer geographical instruction, but less than a dozen have developed research specializations in this area. To these one should add a small number of engineering schools which have professional programs in surveying, photogrammetry, or geodesy. For various reasons there was a gap between official governmental cartography and academic geographical cartography. Geography was once associated with geology, but it has now, at least in North America, moved away from this focus to become a social science. The tradition is thus somewhat different than that of continental Europe in both geography and cartography. Geography in the late fifties and early sixties went through the so-called “quantitative revolution,” in which statistical description replaced verbal description, and formal abstract model building was recognized as superior to anecdotal explanation. Many of the you