Maps are interesting in the context of consciousness because they offer a different way of presenting what we see when we look out over the land. Following the map, we might think that we were looking down at the land from an aeroplane or looking at aerial photographs. More down to earth, we might be looking out over the land from the top of a hill.
A first cut might be that the map goes in for simplification, labelling (in one way or another) and ease of comprehension, while the brain, driven by its camera like eyes, goes in for realism. In any event, the map offers a different solution to the problem of organising the visual world and I think that it is interesting to look at those differences.
One might go on to talk about the fact that our eyes and brains evolved to meet the needs of a very different world from that in which we live in now. A world which did not, in the first instance, include language or much in the way of conscious processing at all – with conscious and unconscious processing having very different strengths and weaknesses. On which point see, for example, chapter 6 of reference 3.
Maps are easy to talk about because they are accessible and because they use well established conventions. All of the 200 or so of the Ordnance Survey Landranger maps of the British Isles (the two parts of Ireland each having made their own arrangements) use exactly the same conventions, conventions which have not changed all that much over the last hundred years or so. And as it says on the front of the map: ‘The all purpose map with public rights of way and tourist information’ – and while ‘all purpose’ is a rather a large claim, these maps have been very successful, and certainly go well beyond the needs of the Master-General of the Ordnance. The new incarnation of the long series of one inch maps, the seventh and last series of which being what I grew up with.
Diagrams, for example of bits of bodies or of bits of machinery, also have such conventions, the relation between, for example, a diagram of a kidney and a kidney is not that different from that between a map of a tract of land and the tract itself. But these conventions have not been publicly systemised to the same extent.
In what follows I write about what Landranger maps do, how they might be used and the way that these maps describe the land. I then go on to consider how this might relate to what the brain and what LWS-N (of reference 2) might do with the same subject matter.
In this I am interested in the finished product, what maps are, not the complicated process by which they come to be.
A Landranger map
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| Figure 1 - Landranger |
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| Figure 2 - legend |
Many features, for example green areas for woods and pink areas for buildings or built up areas, have thin black lines to edge them, giving them a bit of extra definition, making the map easier on the eyes – perhaps playing to, or mimicking in this the way that our vision tends to major on edges.
Part of the trick of a good map is to leave a great deal out, to cut things down to bare essentials. Inter alia, to remove the tree cover which is apt to make aerial photographs difficult to read. A trick which the human eyes and brain cannot pull, although I dare say with training, one could see the essentials through the clutter better than one might otherwise.
A lot of these essentials can be put in one of the first three groups following.
Zero dimensional features
- For example, railway stations, bus stations, churches and trig points
- They have position
- Zero dimensional features are often marked by symbols, symbols which may have little if any relation to what is on the ground. They are conventional symbols, rather as the first Egyptian hieroglyphs were conventional symbols for whatever it is that they stood for
- However, it is also true that, when out in the country, the three different symbols for churches other than cathedrals are often helpful in finding out where one is on a map. Churches with towers, churches with spires and churches without either are useful landmarks, sometimes visible from a good distance. With a church with a spire, for example, being a more positive identifier than any old church. And in the days when more windmills had sails, the distinction between windmills with and windmills without was similarly helpful
- Which cannot be said of radio masts and pylons where it is one size fits all. There is no neat or natural division into symbolic categories of such things. But they are still a great help in finding out or checking where one is.
One dimensional features
- For example, roads, rivers and railways
- They have extent. Put another way, length and direction
- One dimensional features are often smoothed out a bit. No need to show every little twist and turn
- Some one dimensional features are shown by lines, single lines, with a range of weights, colours, dots and dashes – with the combination telling one what sort of thing it is. For example, a county boundary or a public footpath. See Figure 2 above
- Other one dimensional features are shown by a pair of parallel lines, quite close together. The interior may be coloured. The distance apart, the width often varies with the importance or actual width of the feature, but is often quite out of scale, with roads, for example, generally taking up a lot more space on the map than their actual width deserves.
- Which, taken with the smoothing already mentioned, a process which I believe is known to cartographers as ‘generalisation’ – with most small scale maps doing it and most large scale maps, sometimes called plans rather than maps, not doing it.
Two dimensional features
- For example, forests
- They have area. Put another way, shape
- The shape of the area is an accurate representation of the facts on the ground, in the way that, for example, the shapes of roads or symbols are not
- Colour coding may be supplemented with symbols. So forests have symbols indicating the dominant type of tree; pine or broadleaf. This can be seen lower right in Figure 2 above.
Large things
The shape of buildings is generally conventional, but some large buildings, like palaces or areas of horticultural glass, are shown in their true shape.
There are more ad hoc conventions for things like cliffs, rock formations, earthworks and quarries. Usually in black dot, dash or line work. Some of this can be seen in the middle of Figure 2 above.
Colouring for land use
Pink is used to indicate buildings, built up areas.
Green is used to mark forests and smaller wooded areas.
Blue is used for water.
Colour may be supplemented by pattern.
Thick coloured boundaries for things like National Parks and tracts of National Trust land. Too much of this can be irritating, can detract from the appearance of the map.
Contour lines
Topography is indicated by contour lines, often thickly nested in hilly areas – with learning to read topography from contour lines being a part of the curriculum when I was at school.
Note that in others maps, where topography is the most important part of the map, contour lines may be supplemented or replaced by colouring in, according to bands of height. Colouring which can include shade effects, another aid to comprehension. Contrariwise to the cutting out of clutter mentioned above, an aid to comprehension which works by making the map more like a photograph of the terrain mapped and less like a diagram. But which does not work when topography is not the most important part of the map; then it hinders rather than helps.
Text
Text is used to supplement what can be shown graphically. Most of the text is in the form of proper names, for example the name of a town or a farm. Or less commonly, the date of a battle.
Text may or may not be associated with some particular feature or symbol.
An antique font is used for the names of antiques, such as hill forts, battles or castles.
Printing matters
Generally speaking contour lines are printed right across the map and they are visible through features that may have been printed on top of them. The main exception seems to be the coloured roads, where contour lines are absent, or at least invisible. They are visible inside the coloured patches which mark woods (green) and buildings (pink).
Text is printed right across the map, including, on occasion, across coloured roads, although some care has been taken to print names and such like in spaces, where conveniently available. The font and the spacing is adjusted to the nature and size of the feature named. See, for example, ‘Seamer lngs’, bottom right (where ‘lngs’ is not recognised by OED but may be a corruption of ‘lings’, an old word for heather, heath and perhaps, by extension, rough pasture. While carr, also recognised by Ordnance Survey, is recognised by OED).
Meta features
That is to say information which is more about the map itself, than what the map is of, what the map is describing. Grid lines and grid identifiers. Mostly if not always in a distinctive blue.
Room for improvement
Landranger maps have succeeded in meeting the needs of enough people to pay the wages of those who create the maps; people who were reached by putting lots of maps into lots of shop windows. And it is now possible, with computers, to do even better, to customise the map for particular customers or for particular groups of people, although I imagine the volume of such sales is modest. Indeed, I believe that the Ordnance Survey will now to do digital specials over the wire, specials which are probably based on the use of layers – different sorts of feature being assigned to different layers – and labelling. Give me a map of area A using features with properties P, Q or R drawn from layers X, Y and Z. Which was not possible in the days when each map was, in effect, drawn by hand.
However, there are limits. Such selection cannot go beyond the periodic maintenance updates of a map database with periodic surveys of the land in question. The map is only as good as the database from which it is built. And such periodic surveys are not going to be much good at fire damage to forests, at floods or at traffic conditions – and for information about this sort of thing the aerial photograph is going to come into its own. Perhaps aerial photographs overlaid by computer trickery onto a regular map. The sort of thing that both Gmaps and Bing Maps do in their satellite and aerial views.
And such a partnership might get us a bit closer to what the brain is doing.
How does all this compare with looking out of an aeroplane?
The obvious point to make is that a map is much more readily comprehensible and there is much more knowledge, much more useful information. We are not usually interested, for example, in minor changes in colour and texture across the fields. But we are interested in the name of this or that village.
Looking down from a low flying aeroplane, it is usually easy enough, cloud and weather permitting, to identify built up areas, isolated farms, fields, forests, railways and the larger roads. To say that this or that blob down there is probably a farm, but not to have any very precise idea about where that farm is or how you might reach it and probably no idea at all about what it might be called – as apart from the odd exceptional building, features of the land do not come with labels. Indeed, interpretation of aerial photographs used to be a skilled business, given to professionals, professionals who are only now being displaced by computers.
And what about Aerial 3D?
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| Figure 3 - Aerial 3D |
At which point one starts to think about the purpose of the map. Which, in this particular case, seems to be to give an impression of the terrain. Something like what one would actually see if one was there. Perhaps for someone who has never been there and wants to know what it might look like if he did go there. Perhaps for someone who has been there and wants to use the map as a prop to help him share the experience with others. One could do this last with the regular Landranger map, but this new map can be moved about, is more striking (at least when there are mountains about) and a lot more accessible to those unfamiliar with both maps and mountains.
And I suppose one might display such a thing on one’s telephone while one stood on the top of Snowdon in order to be sure about the various sights. But all this is adding a different kind of value to that added by the Landranger maps – with most of this last being missing from Figure 3.
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| Figure 4 - the spectrum |
Which reminds one that, with Landranger, one does not have the complication of point of view. One is just viewing from above, and that is that, while both Bing’s Birds’ Eye and Ordnance Survey’s Aerial 3D, have slanting points of view which can be moved about.
And gets me to wondering about how many people, say in their twenties and thirties, still use proper maps? Is there still a viable market for them?
How does all this compare with what we would expect in the brain, in LWS-N?
For these purposes we imagine, rather than being in an aeroplane looking down from on high, that we are walkers, standing on some slight eminence and looking out across the country, spread out in front of us. Perhaps we are stood, looking north, on the tower of the church at Brompton-by-Sawdon, bottom left in Figure 1 above, more or less due south of the forest top left.
Unlike the Ordnance Survey and as noted above, the brain is in the business of delivering something like a photograph of the outside world to consciousness. Something like, at least to the extent of our being able to say how realistic a photograph is compared with a diagram. Remembering here that while I might be hypothesising with LWS_N that what the brain stores, at least for the purposes of projection into consciousness, is something rather like a photograph expressed as an array of pixels, that hypothesis might well turn out to be false, well wide of the mark. But there are, nevertheless, some clues in these maps as to what LWS-N might be doing, ought to be about.
LWS-N does not do zero dimensional, one dimensional and two dimensional, as everything is two dimensional, expressed as shape nets and texture nets. So points come in as very small shape nets and lines come in as very long thin shape nets. There are no conventional symbols, although the brain might learn that the distinction between a church with a spire and a church with a tower can be important and bring it, where appropriate, into consciousness.
The brain is more into junctions, boundaries and edges than into lines, for example the junction between the image of a tree trunk and that of the wood behind. A junction which does exist on the retina and which does persist at least some way up the cerebral food chain. And such junctions are, I would think, more common in the natural world than the various approximations to lines that come with the hanging stems of creepers, the erect stamens of flowers and the gossamer webs of spiders.
And junctions fit quite well with the shape nets of LWS-N.
While properly straight edges, straight lines and lines generally only really got going when we started to build and started to make thread, string and rope, all relatively recently in evolutionary terms.
A map does labels, either through its graphical conventions or by means of labels. I believe that the brain does something of this sort, with, in the case of LWS-N, this supplementary information being held on a supporting layer, from which it is linked to the visual information by column objects. In this way, the spacing and positioning of text might be echoed in the placement of some of the corresponding information on that support layer. So the name of an area, for example, the ‘Seamer lngs’ already mentioned, might occupy much the same space on our cortical sheet as the area in question, albeit on a different layer.
Perhaps it is not too far fetched to claim that when looking out over a tract of land that I know well, much of what is on the map does make it to consciousness, in a cunning combination of input from the eyes and input from memory.
A map is selective, concentrating on what is thought to be important. The brain does this too, albeit in a rather different way, in a local rather than a global way, with, for example, one only becoming aware of something in the periphery of the visual field when something moves or changes in an unexpected way. One might be looking out to the north east from the tower of the church Brompton-by-Sawdon, looking at the spire of the church at Wykeham a couple of miles away, not really taking anything much else in. Perhaps one just has the sense that it is all there because, if prompted, one can very quickly move one’s attention away from the spire, to somewhere and something else.
A map is a little economical with the truth as regards roads and railways, in the interests of comprehension. I believe the brain does something of the same sort, tidying things up; so, having decided that this blur in the bushes is a tiger, it quite often rounds out the visual image to be more tiger-like than perhaps it really is. But it does this within the confines of an image which is photographic in style. It also manages somehow to make the things that we are attending to seem bigger than they do to the camera. At least than they do to my Microsoft telephone.
But in sum, perhaps the big takeaway is that Ordnance Survey, over a long period, have evolved an effective but eclectic set of features and conventions with which to draw their Landranger maps. It is not a case of designing one good feature and doing everything with it. It is probably fair to say that this is something that is shared with packages like Word and Powerpoint, that these last have their effective but eclectic set of features and conventions too. So perhaps we should expect LWS_N, as it grows, to be the same. Perhaps we should expect a brain, on closer inspection, to be the same.
A translation from words to pictures
It so happens that, while writing this note, I have also been reading the Maigret story ‘L’Affaire Saint-Fiacre’ and comparing it with the television version starring Michael Gambon. For some reason I have yet to work out, the television version omits the drunken dinner party which draws together all the parties involved (in good Agatha Christie fashion) and which occupies much of the tail end of the written version. But it has struck me that there are all kinds of things which are easy to do with words and which are hard to do in pictures and vice-versa.
There is a clear analogy here with the corresponding relationship between maps on paper and maps in the mind.
References
Reference 1: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/shop/os-maps-online.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/an-introduction-to-lws-n.html.
Reference 3: Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do - John Bargh – 2017. And searching this blog for ‘Bargh’ turns up lots of stuff.
Reference 4: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/docs/legends/50k-raster-legend.pdf.
Reference 5: L’Affaire Saint-Fiacre – Simenon – 1932.
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