Ideas - Why world maps illustrate an artificial reality

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

The Gulf of America/Gulf of Mexico controversy reminds us that maps may appear authoritative, but are a version of reality. At the same time, they can be rich, beautiful and informative, as Vancouver���s Kathleen Flaherty explains, in this 2005 documentary made before Google Maps changed mapmaking forever.

When they predict we'll fall, we rise to the challenge. When they say we're not a country, we stand on guard. This land taught us to be brave and caring, to protect our values, to leave no one behind. Canada is on the line, and it's time to vote as though our country depends on it, because like never before, it does. I'm Jonathan Pedneau, co-leader of the Green Party of Canada.

This election, each vote makes a difference. Authorized by the Registeredleader of the Green Party of Canada. This election, each vote makes a difference. Authorized by the registered agent of the Green Party of Canada. This is a CBC Podcast. Gulf of America name change in the USaming of a particular site in January, Google Maps responded in this way. Information System, GNIS, has officially updated Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. As we announced two weeks ago and consistent with our long-standing practices, we've begun rolling out changes to reflect this update. The Gulf is an international body of water, bordering Mexico, the U.S., and Cuba.

People using maps in the U.S. will see Gulf of America, and people in Mexico will see Gulf of Mexico. Everyone else will see both names. That voice may be AI, but what it says is a reminder that maps, even official ones, are an entirely human creation. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. It's no surprise that map making can be subjective.

Borders and names change, a result of conflict, colonialism, liberation, or restoration. What to include, what to emphasize, how to reflect changes. Those considerations all come into play when creating maps. And as anyone who's ever spun an atlas or read Lord of the Rings can attest, maps can be creative and beautiful too. Today on Ideas, we revisit a documentary about maps from our archive.

Unfolding Visions was produced at a moment when many maps were making the transition from analog to digital. Producer Kathleen Flaherty begins the episode with a paper map at a site in Vancouver. The year is 2005. Okay, so right now, we are at the back of the International Terminal Building

Level 2 at the compactor area. So even though we're looking at the map and we see the compactor appears to be at the top of the page, in fact one has to turn the page 180 degrees and see, oh there's the compactor, that's where we're standing. Okay, and we're trying to get over here. Uh, yeah. Is that right? Okay. We're going to go... Mary-Gene O'Donnell is a waste management consultant.

She and I are using a map to tour the garbage rooms in the Vancouver International Airport. So the first thing that you can see is that even though we're on level 2 and we're trying to get somewhere on level 2, the first thing we have to do is go up to level 3. Where is that on the map? It's another map. It's map number 2. Mary Jean uses maps in her work to streamline ways to get garbage from the places where

it gets generated through various sorting systems to several disposal locations. Her maps of the airport do not show landmarks that travelers might need. They're made for people who work in the airport. Every map is made with a specific purpose in mind. Like one of my favorite maps, the map an artist friend drew to his river property. That map says nothing about terrain, the elevation, the roads not taken. It's got a perfect little drawing of his caravan. It was made for one thing by one person. Lou Scoda has been making maps for 50 years. He learned to make maps the old way, by hand.

On the way to meet a cartographer, you tend to notice a lot of maps. The transit map in the SkyTrain, for instance. It displays the order of the stations very clearly. The user doesn't need information about the surrounding landscape. Which is probably why I'm a bit surprised to find myself in an industrial park in Coquitlam, BC. I don't know quite what I was expecting to find in Lou Skoda's workplace. Quill pens? Engraving tools?

What I did find was a modern, modest, organized suite of offices. The walls are covered with maps. The sun coming in the window slowly warms the room with support from a heater in the corner. In his accent, you can trace Lou Skoda's history from the former Czechoslovakia through Australia and finally to the lower mainland of British Columbia. The Canadian surveying and mapping community

redefined itself from being surveyors and hydrographers and cartographers to being geomaticists. We have a science of geomatics. I define airfield as cartomatics. It's an applied science methodological discipline, completely concerned with inventorying, analysis, and communication of information that has spatial characteristics. Applied science. But I asked him, what does a cartographer, cartomatisists do? Well, very simply cartographer makes maps. Cartographer will dream up a map or design a map. Cartographer will then design a project. Cartographer will identify the need for a map. Cartographer will find information that's needed to prepare the map.

Cartographer will then manipulate the information and put it in some map form. And then either the cartographer himself or herself will then create the final graphics or assign the preparation of the final graphics to somebody else, a supporting technician. Somehow, I hadn't expected to hear the word dream in the job description. It does evoke the romance of cartography and tales of exploration. On the other hand, the word manipulate, even in its classic sense of taking something in one's hands and moving it, speaks of map as artifact.

Maps are basically, they're an artificial representation of reality. It's sort of a snapshot in time. It's a static picture or interpretation of reality. David Crothers is a regional planner. His background is in the graphic arts, which may explain why he so easily discusses maps as visual narratives.

We look at the early maps of Canadian exploration, you know, where large parts of Canada were still unknown or left blank, and it tells the story of the time. You could do a whole cartographic archaeology or investigation and reconstruct what was happening in a culture based on the maps by looking at what was known at the time, what values are being represented, and who did the mapping, who controlled the maps. I mean it's a very deliberate form of narration that certainly is going to outlive the mapper who makes them. So one of the important things about a map is deciding what's going to be on it, right?

That's right. That's right. What's the story you want to tell? And how do you tell that story? Speaking of storytelling, years ago I read a book called How to Lie with Maps. It made me an instant fan of geographer Marc Monménier, an enthusiasm shared by many map lovers. In all his books, Marc Monménier warns of the danger of forgetting that maps are creations made with purpose, and the way he uses the word manipulate implies its more common meaning, influence or control shrewdly or deviously. Maps are so easy to manipulate. I mean, you can move boundaries on them.

You can use them to represent as real things which are not real. People tend to accept them as being factual, and I think there's a general tendency on the part of the general public because they have worked with maps which have worked. I mean your standard street map generally works. It might be out of date but you can recognize that road maps generally work so that when people see a map they think okay this is truth and because we are trusting of them. It's so easy if one wants to be devious, to manipulate them. Even street maps can tell little white lies.

It may be an urban myth, but rumor has it that during the Cold War, Moscow street maps were littered with errors to defeat attempts by foreign spies to get around. Mark Monmarnier cautions that it's also possible to lie by omission. You can leave things off. You can exclude hazardous waste dumps. You can exclude nuclear power plants. You can exclude factories that have big black plumes.

You can show principally golf courses. You can show forests and parks and things like that. The cartographic historian, Brian Hurley, had a term, which I think is a very good one here, cartographic silences. It's possible to deliberately spin the interpretation of a map by consciously excluding certain kinds of details, by basically creating maps that are silent about different things. Maps can be very, very biased. Brian Harley's concept of cartographic silences is eloquent. Of course, some of these silences are unintentional, like the maps in the first issue of the magazine Pure Canada in 2003, which among other mistakes omitted Prince Edward Island and the Yukon territories, along with Halifax, Fredericton, and Brandon.

Those maps were probably a little quieter than the publisher had intended. Mary Jean's maps of the Vancouver International Airport evoke a simple truism. It's easier to read a map when you already know where you're going, or when you have the landscape somehow in your head. It's pretty hard to read those things. Like you have to know where you're going, right? Yes, I was oriented by someone else who showed me. Although some of the garbage rooms I had to find on my own. And we basically just did that through a trial and error.

All the rooms are actually numbered. So I just, just like a regular street map, I just look for the numbers. So if I'm looking for something that's labeled 1800 and I'm in the 1500s, I know I just have to keep walking as the numbers get larger, and eventually I'll find what I'm looking for. Empty spaces aren't the only things that can get a map in trouble. Some famous maps have fallen into disrepute because of confusion about intent. The Mercator map, for instance. In my school days, before we had a picture of the world

from space, a chocolate bar company sponsored the map, which was prominently displayed on most classroom walls. It never occurred to me that it wasn't the picture of the world. In the mid-1970s, the Mercator map fell into disfavor, underscorn even, because of its particular view of the Earth. In the Mercator projection, Greenland, which has 0.8 million square miles, looks equal in size to Africa, which has 11.6 million square miles. Because the Mercator distorts size so much at the poles, the northern hemisphere appears much larger than it really is and the developing countries are diminished in importance. It isn't likely that

cartographer Gerardus Mercator intended the map to demonstrate a Eurocentric view or the domination of the white races. After all, the original purpose for the map was navigation. The Mercator map is useful for, I think, three principal reasons. One, if you're concerned with, like, navigation, one of the things you can do with a Mercator chart is you can mark the place where you are with a point, the place where you want to go with another point, draw a straight line from one to the other.

When measured the angle between this straight line and a meridian, and that angle gives you a constant bearing, and when basically, if you start on that particular course, on stay of the course, eventually you will wind up at your destination. Our second application for a Mercator map would be a world map where you're not gonna look at the whole thing at once. But if you wanted to just sort of stand next to this map, let's say you have a wall map,

and if you want to let's say look at relatively narrow regions, let's say you're concerned just with Germany, this would be a reasonably decent map because basically within that general area, shapes would be reasonably accurate. When distances, relative distances would be relatively accurate as well.

And because you are looking at a relatively small part of the world, the distortion of area within that small region would really not be that bad. A third application for a Mercator map would be propaganda. The John Birch Society in the US found the Mkhedr chart very useful back in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s for like magnifying the size of the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, and also Red China, which I guess appropriately, if you want to scare people, was represented on red. I mean, I suppose too, you know, probably if you wanted to frighten people about the size of Canada, it would also work.

We're so used to looking at maps of Canada that show the vast landmass that it's strange to see a map which focuses only on the people. Lou Scoda made his most famous map, the Canadian Isodemographic Map, with J.C. Robertson in 1972. This map was made for two purposes, to demonstrate the extent of urbanization of Canada and to serve as a base map for other thematic maps in which people rather than territory are an issue, like say voting. Think for example of the maps we saw on television of the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

The large center of the country was Republican red while Democrat blue skirted the edges. It looked like a landslide Republican win. If the size of the states had represented their population instead of their territory, the map of the vote would have more accurately depicted the 50-50 split that actually occurred. As Lou Skoda points out, you use his isodemographic map selectively. It's a population density map. It's a map about people. On that map, there is no information about land

unless that land is occupied by people. So any time that extent that the land base or sovereign boundaries are an important issue, this map is no use at all. In fact, it might be misleading. What is almost as fascinating as the map itself is how it was made. How did they make a population map look even vaguely like Canada when the vast majority of the people are huddled along the border? There was no process, no known process that could be used to create such a map. The first

option, of course, that we investigated was the way to get at it through digital processing, through computer processing, but that didn't work. Computer technology was just not adequately developed to help us. So we chose an analogue process in which we chose bow bearings and and we approximated the boundaries of the census units with 1 eighth metal strips that were hinged to represent boundary nodes. So it was very simple to calculate how many balls we would need for each unit and this was done assigning 50 people per ball. Each census unit was prepared in little bags and labeled. Then we constructed the defenses and then poured the balls in them in order to make it tight. We simply then condensed the fences to go tightly around the number of balls and just continue the structure.

That template for the map fit onto a six foot by ten foot piece of plywood. Resin was eventually poured into the fenced off areas to hold the ball bearings in place so it could be displayed vertically. The paper version resembles a T-bone steak. It shows areas of large population density in pink, linked by much smaller white areas which have comparatively low population densities. The biggest areas are grouped around the Great Lakes and along the St. Lawrence with another big pink blob on the far left side of the map, Vancouver. 30 years after the Canadian isodemographic map, map making is a long way from pouring ball bearings into metal fences and drawing the results.

Computers have joined up with global positioning satellites to systematize databases of geographic information. The results are called GIS or geographic information systems. Jesse Gordon, manager of technical services for the Namgis First Nation in Alert Bay BC, gave me the quick course of GIS for dummies in his kitchen while the January rain poured down outside. All of these positions in the database are referenced to the real world. So it will be in meters from the equator and so many meters from the prime meridian, or it will be in latitude and longitude or whatever coordinate system you are using.

So if you took a GPS receiver that had a capture capability, turned it on, walked along a chunk of shoreline, and followed very carefully the high tide line of the shoreline for as far as you can go, turned the thing off, brought it back. What the machine was doing is an interval of every, say, one second or 10 seconds, it would snap a position, say, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. So you'd get a list of points.

You then bring those back and put those back into your computer and you tell your GIS system, connect all these points into a single line, and then that single line, name it shoreline, certain date, certain location, whatever, and you start to have a feature of the Earth. So you can very accurately represent features on the earth that are captured as database entries in the computer. And of course the

database may not be of physical features of the earth. These days people use GIS to make risk assessments for insurance purposes or to decide where to put up the new mega mall or to target your neighbourhood with ads for renovations, or anything else that can be organised into a database. Let's take demographics, for example. You've got a distribution of people in a city, and you want to say, by preference of beer. So you go out and you collect the information. You go down

5th Street and up 7th Avenue and collect all the information. Each location, each you know a street address, which is an X and a Y on the map again, gets a certain value according to the kind of beer they like. When you're all done you plot all the people who like one kind of beer in one color, all the people who like another kind of beer in another color, and then you display this map or the background of your city with all these points on it, lit up with the by their beer preference, and you start to see the patterns of what kinds of beer are preferred in what parts of the city. Sociological behavior rendered into a GIS.

Back in the Vancouver International Airport, Mary Jean and I have visited two garbage rooms to check on the compliance with recycling. Pretty good so far. Mary Jean's maps are missing all kinds of details. She can only tell where the food courts are by the collections of blue dots which represent garbage bins. So my maps only are concerned with the location of the garbage and recycling containers and all of the other details like food or washrooms are really incidental and so aren't clearly marked on my maps. So now we're going gonna go to this elevator.

Oh my God, I'm completely lost. Can you show me where we are? Sure. Okay, so now we're still on level one. And so we came out here. There was the place that wasn't on the map. Yeah, and actually, yeah, the Compost area had to add because it wasn't on the map. That's true. And so we just came from the Compost Area and then we came out and we came right

and now we're in front of elevators four and five, which I've numbered because this is a key elevator to the movement of where we need to go. So now we are going to go to the compactor, and that's on level two. So we have to find our elevators four and five, which are there. And so again, the scale on this map has changed. One in doubt is always hard. Even if you're clear about the purpose for a particular map, it takes both science and art to represent what needs to be represented. Mark Monmonier suggests that one of the first issues is the scale of the map.

You have to decide on what I call geographic scope. Geographic scope basically relates to the size of the area which is being shown. Geographic scope can be relatively narrow, focusing on a single neighborhood. It can be relatively broad, perhaps focusing on the entire world. There's also the issue of the size of the physical map itself. And basically, when you consider the map size as well as geographic scope, these two generally translate into the issue of map scale. Scale basically is the ratio between distance on the map to the corresponding distance on

the ground. Okay, this is one of those counterintuitive ideas I have to keep repeating to myself over and over. Small number in the fraction, say one to 10,000, large scale. Large number, like one to 250,000, small scale. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] From the Ideas Archive from 2005,

you're listening to a documentary about maps called Unfolding Visions. IDEAS is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, and in Australia on ABC Radio National. You can also stream us around the world at cbc.ca. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. When they predict we'll fall, we rise to the challenge.

When they say we're not a country, we stand on guard. This land taught us to be brave and caring, to protect our values, to leave no one behind. Canada is on the line, and it's time to vote as though our country depends on it, because like never before, it does. I'm Jonathan Pednaud, co-leader of the Green Party of Canada. This election, each vote makes a difference. Authorized by the Registered Agent of the Green Party of Canada.

I've just been to Specsavers and upgraded my lenses to extra thin and light with 50% off. Now what else can I upgrade? My cat? Wow! My scooter? Oh yeah! Get 50% off lens upgrades in the Specsavers Spring Sale. Hey, I can upgrade my kids! You chill, Mom. I'll load the dishwasher.

Awesome! Exclusions apply. See Specsavers.ca for details. Offer ends soon. What kind of map does a cartographer appreciate? The answer can be surprising. It was a map of Lower Mainland. It had Fraser Valley defined in a recognizable way. There was the river and it had some of the major roads on it as well. And then it had two markings. There were two crosses. One cross was labeled Our House and the other cross was labeled Grandma's House. See, it had everything.

It had selection, it had emphasis, it had reliable information. I had it hanging in my office, in front of me as I sat at my desk. I often, very often just looked at it and reflected on this little genius. That is map-paker Lou Skoda speaking with producer Kathleen Flaherty back in 2005. Her documentary about maps was made just before Google Maps came into existence,

in an era when digitization was ramping up, replacing the scrolled, folded, and displayed maps that came before. From two decades ago in the Ideas Archive, here's the second half of Kathleen Flaherty's episode, Unfolding Visions. The history of exploration is full of tales of surveyor cartographers battling the elements and the geography to measure and map every step of every journey. Jesse Gordon has a great appreciation for what each and every mile of the maps required. I don't know if most people who would get an atlas

and look at, say, a British Ordinance map of, you know, the Midlands of Britain had any idea the incredible amount of human effort went into making those maps as good as they were. Literally, people went with a tape measure and a compass every meter or mile of the ground. A lot of the things that we found later have been errors in our maps of British Columbia or Canada were just because of the enormous size of this country we live in.

You just physically don't have the manpower to walk around doing this kind of ground-truthing. Topographical maps are used in matters of sovereignty and management of resources. Like most countries, Canada has spent many dollars and man-hours mapping the land, comparing old maps to new maps, until all the physical features appear on one map or another. And these maps have the reputation for telling a clear and accurate story of the land, its elevations, its soils, its waters. So they serve as the basis for hundreds of different kinds of thematic maps. Maps with all the landfill sites in a region, maps with all the fire stations, maps with hazardous materials routes,

maps of emergency escape, maps of, well, whatever data you need to plot on a map requires a map to plot it on. Which brings me back to David Carruthers, a planner. Like many map users, he has discovered that not everyone has equal access to those maps. If say the people of Kowartha, Ontario want to map a new approach to marketing their agricultural products, they're going to need a base map.

And maybe they won't be able to afford one. The Canadian approach to public information around maps has been borrowed from the British model where maps have been regarded as a government asset and in fact dating back to the time of the monarchy where the monarchy controlled maps in the UK under lock and key and they saw the value and the importance of maps as a strategic tool in building the British Empire and limited the access to their maps. You know, just trying to find out where the roads, streams, wetlands, lakes are. I think the average user is going to have a very rude awakening when you go online

and you see that you have to punch in your credit card number and you're going to be asked to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars for digital base data, base data that the taxpayer has already paid for. Governments continue to make maps and each province manages that process in its own unique way. Jesse Gordon tells a tale from British Columbia. Some years ago the government of British Columbia thought it's time that we had one consistent base map for the entire province of British Columbia. A noble and really worthwhile effort, which unfortunately got caught up in politics. They conceived of and commissioned the TRIM project, which is Terrain Resource Information

Mapping. The TRIM project was a series of contracts to a number of very highly respected and very capable mapping companies to render a whole sections of the provinces mapping, digital mapping into a standard. And that in itself was a good thing. They decided that since the information, the source for all of this, had to come from a bunch of different ministries within the government, that they'd better create a new entity for this. And then they did. And that entity built its own little empire in no time. So that by the time there was some trim quote product,

some usable maps in this new standardized format, there was also an agency that wanted to charge $600 per map sheet. Now a map sheet is, I could be wrong, but I believe their standard map sheet is 10 kilometers on a side. There are something on the order of two and a half thousand of them to cover BC. At $600 a sheet, who could afford it? The new land title and survey authority of British Columbia has recently replaced all the old 1 to 10,000 scale maps with new 1 to 20,000 maps. Some claim that these new smaller scale maps are nearly impossible to read and contain

the kinds of errors of omission common when a smaller map covers a bigger area. On the plus side, they're all clean and digital and as Vancouver Sun columnist Stephen Hume notes, all fit into standard filing cabinets instead of requiring those big map filers. Mary, Jean and I have moved from the domestic terminal to the international terminal where the garbage rooms are fewer and further between. So if we look at the map and we're standing, this is another one of these ones that has to be upside down, we're standing right here and it looks like, oh, we could go off this way, but as you can see, even though the map shows that it goes, we can't go because that's

another restricted area. So we can't go that way. We have to go up and across the regular way. So we do that on the escalator? Let's take the escalator. Which again is shown on this map as a little squiggle. My name's Brett Firth, and I'm the project manager for the back row map books. My job is essentially to start the map book where we lay it

out on each province, and depending on how big we want the map book to cover or how much land and then I follow it straight through to finish production. A friend has steered me to Muzio Brothers, a small company that makes the backroad map book series. After some messing around on the strangely angled streets in a Burnaby industrial park, I find it in a two-story office complex. Office complex? Where are the huge drafting tables? The giant presses? Back road map books are just what they sound like. Books of large-scale maps on eight and a half by

eleven sheets coil bound together. The Vancouver Island book, for example, has 45 maps. I asked Brett to talk about how the process starts. What we do is we sort of analyze the different parts of the province, say for Saskatchewan, we're doing the southern book right now, and we just sort of see where people go and what type of book is going to be useful for them. It can be like a small-scale map where it covers a large section of land, the safest sketch when that works out well because there's not too too much there. For another province like BC where there's a lot of things going on in a small area, large-scale maps are sort of the way to go.

Although they're based on standard topographical maps, these maps have a very different look. Stark, clean and modern, these beautiful maps are designed for hikers, campers, sports fishers and off-roaders. The only obvious indications of people are the areas containing street grids. Form follows function in map design, as Lou Skoda explains. A thematic map often can be recognized as consisting of two parts, a base map and the thematic data. The process of selection varies between the two. In the thematic data, the

process is very simply determined by the purpose of the map. You only select information that you require to make a point, to make an argument. That information is presented on a base map. Now a base map is a simple description of the territory that is involved in that presentation of the thematic data. What we generally attempt to do that is involved in that presentation of the thematic data. What we generally attempt to do when we abstract reality and prepare a map, we obviously have to generalize.

We have to generalize because it's not possible to present all the information that exists in physical reality. We generalize in two ways. We generalize in two ways. We generalize by simplification and we generalize by omission. In the simplification process the final result should contain the salient essential characteristic of the landscape that we are preparing. If we have fjordlands for

example the generalized map that has fjordlands, the coast of British Columbia for example, must finish up looking like a land that has a lot of fjords in it. The other step of generalizing is the one by omission and there are strict rules about omission. What we never do is mix the two. In for example mapping a lot of small islands is to just put a coastline around half a dozen islands because they are so close together and sort of make it simpler. That is never done. If the islands individually are too small to be shown, we just leave them off. In the stairwell at Muzio Brothers, Brett and I look at the pages of the Southern Saskatchewan

map book, Taped to the Wall. Just as the size of the book was chosen to facilitate easy use, so are the choices of line weight and symbolization. Okay. Well, what we do is we sit down and we get everybody together, all of our cartographers and my boss and myself, and we just go, well, what's going to make the most sense? How can we depict this feature the best? And you know, after we sort of looked at it, we found that that sort of denotes that that's

a paved road, the easiest to our user, even if they don't go through and read a legend. They can still look at it and go, okay, well, that road looks different. It looks like it's more prominent. And you know, to us, when it's more prominent, we're hoping that sort of indicates it's better for them to drive on, a little easier for them to get around. Color is one design element that communicates subtly, even subconsciously. Take red for instance. It connotes power, strength, maybe danger. Lou Skoda tells me what colour is supposed to accomplish

in a map. We talk about conveying the information to the user in the best and most effective way. We're talking about generating color contrast. We're talking about associations, color associations. That's the visual process of of perceiving that two color groups are somehow associated. What else is there? Contrast, association, and clarity. Here's a revelation. When Lou Skoda talks about color, he's talking about science. Even the aesthetic sounding phrase, color harmony, implies a scientific approach. In this world of color, there are three attributes that can be described. Hue,

which most of us think of as the color, red, blue, yellow. Saturation, which most of us think of as the intensity. And gray tone, which is the amount of black that's in the color. Early in his career, Lou Skoda learned of a color classification system that had been mapped on a sphere by a scientist named Albert Munsell. At the turn of the century, last century, I must remember we are in the new century today, at the turn of the last century an anatomy teacher called Munsell at the Boston Technical School, I think it was, was facing a problem about choosing colors for describing different parts of the anatomy. And he thought it was necessary to do some classification to help with his work.

He came up with a system that Naiz recognized as a Munsell color system. He organized colors in such a way that every possible color in the whole universe could be described by three characteristic numbers or set of numbers. That system is currently used by the scientific society in North America and extensively used by people in geosciences and soils included. It's fully defined in scientific terms so it's acceptable and it's replicable, it's reliable, it's very good. It's possible that Lou Skoda's street map of Nanaimo, B.C. owes its vibrancy and visual appeal in part at least to his choices of color. His firm, Canadian Cartographics, publishes maps with no black. Instead, they use high-definition purple.

They've also moved from the standard red and very far from the standard yellow. Whatever Lou Skoda says, the color choices may be as much instinct as science. Every map, whether it's a soils map or a map of crime statistics, benefits from a deliberate attention to color. On level three of international departures, Mary-Jean and I leave the elevator in search of the way back down to level two, where the next garbage room awaits us. So, okay, so now, so the same rule applies with this map that we have to actually turn it this way.

So we are, we are, where are we? Good question. We are coming into the building because if you see the circle, that's the Jade canoe. So there's the Jade canoe. So we're actually entering from somewhere over here. At Muzio Brothers, Dale Tober shows me the symbols on his desktop and points to the two main reasons for making any choice. We try to pick out what's most valuable and put it in, make it so it's more visual and visually attractive, making it more aesthetic and more pleasing to the eye. And so we mixed the cartographic conventions and the aesthetically pleasing attributes in the map

and try to find that happy medium so people can adequately see the map and still get as much information out of it as they require. Mark Monmonier has patiently explained the major cartographic conventions in hundreds of pages of text. One thing he suggests is to use systems that make intuitive sense. Generally speaking, if you have count data, you should use symbols that vary in magnitude. So you have a cartographic metaphor where simply bigger means more.

There's a tendency sometimes for developers of software, even in their training manuals, not to realize that there's a very important distinction between intensity data and count data. An example of intensity data would be population density, persons per square mile. If you use a symbolization metaphor where simply darker means more and lighter means less, and you can show this in the map key, it's relatively easy for people to latch onto that. So that if they see two counties side by side, and one is slightly darker than the other county, they can look at it and say, okay, well, the county that has the darker symbol has a higher rate. That's straightforward. They don't have to be running back and forth to the map key

to discern, let's say, whether orange represents more or less than yellow. So, easy to read is important, but easy to read doesn't mean it isn't misleading. It's not just the data itself that tells certain stories. The category divisions or classifications of the data can influence our reading. I have an example in How to Live with Maps where I have classifications that yield two maps that look very different from each other. Oh, and they can also suggest radically different interpretations. This simple example is for a group of the eastern states, and the data are the percentage of households that had telephones.

The year is back in 1960, where this works reasonably well. What I do is, in this example, I keep the number of categories constant, and I keep my symbols constant. And I have a very, very light tone, I have an intermediate tone, and I have a dark tone. So I have three high categories, low, and medium, and high. And I can vary the breaks between my categories. And as a result of changing category breaks, I came up with one map, which makes the entire region look very disadvantaged.

In other words, it puts a lot of homes into the lowest category, which seems to imply that there are not very many houses that have a telephone, relatively speaking. On the other map, I have most of my estates in the highest category, and this, I think, is a very good example of how one can basically spin the interpretation of a map by the kind of symbols that you use and in this case also by classification. In map number one, the category breaks are below 10% low, 10 to 15% medium, and above 15% high. medium and above 15 percent high. In map number two the categories are below 20 percent low, 20 to 30 percent medium and above 30 percent high. Both these maps are very easy to read. If you like me aren't looking at the key very

carefully you will probably not question the conclusions the map implies. It's not a lie, but it's certainly misleading. Despite the paranoid sounding title of his book, How to Lie with Maps, Mark Monmarnier doesn't really think map bias is always or even usually intentional. I feel that the principal thing which happens is not so much a kind of conscious bias, although that obviously is something that map users have to be aware of and have to be on the lookout for, especially I guess when you have maps that are concerned with any kind of

environmental controversy. But there also simply is a situation where you basically have mapmakers who are very naive, who might overlook data, who might simply put things on maps that really are not important, where they're trying, let's say, to fill space. It's relatively easy for everybody to be a map maker these days. And so, yeah, I think it is important for the average map user to be simply wary of the fact that what you have in front of you is but one of a very large number of maps that could have been created with the same data. Lou Skoda agrees that new map makers could use more training in cartographic conventions,

but he's surprisingly enthusiastic about the technology. The geographic information mapping existed long before computers were even thought of, let alone invented. After we were able to add to this geographic information the computer technology system, we came up with something as in Gestalt, hell of a lot more than just the parts. And although developers and people who are trying to sell you things are prominent among the users of GIS, David Carruthers delights in some of the creative uses of mapping technologies. You know, you have the whole war-chalking movement of people going around the cities

with their notebook computers, picking up wireless internet signals to get onto the World Wide Web. And when they connect with a good signal, they put an icon on the sidewalk of that location. And people are mapping those locations of where you can go to get free wireless internet access, where the hot spots are. There's the whole murmur movement where there's an icon of an ear with a phone number. And you go to a site and when you see that you call with your cell phone the number and someone will tell you

the story of the building or the place or the community where you're standing. New technologies do not mean that we can ignore the conventions that help Make Maps tell their stories clearly and truthfully, but they do mean that more people and different people can tell those stories. As Jesse Gordon implies, the reader has become the writer. Map is now a verb. When the whole technique of mapping lay in the hands of people who needed a lot of education,

a lot of training and a lot of skill, cartographers and surveyors, mapping was something you, you know, it's one of those things that you felt distanced from. But lately with the advent of computers and the ability of computers to make some of this technology a lot more accessible to people, people are becoming much more attached to it in a personal way. They're involved in the process of it. On Vancouver Island, I would bet there are in the thousands of people that are involved in mapping,

even though they might not think of themselves as involved in mapping, but they're involved in environmental groups, they're involved in conservation societies, they're involved in watershed preservation groups, and all of those people have gone out and made sketches of the streamside involved in conservation societies, they're involved in watershed preservation groups, and all of those people have gone out and made sketches of the stream side or counted fish or done those kinds of involvements that the information from which has gone back to

a GIS that their own project or program runs. And that information has then flowed back into the government registries or the other libraries of information. So the the result of this is that an awful lot more people feel a lot more connected to the whole process of mapping. It's not as mystical as it used to be. Mary-Jean and I have circled through the entire garbage collection system at the airport and we're on our way back across the International Terminal. Have you ever ended up somewhere where you're not supposed to be?

Yeah, it's happened to me frequently, especially on the International Terminal because that's where all the customs areas are. And so every once in a while some of those elevators like we did there where you get on it and you think you're going to end up one place but then no. You come out and you're in the middle of the customs thing and they can't they won't let you go because of course you're not in transit anywhere so you have to get back on the elevator and choose a new floor. So now can we find our way back to where we came in? Oh yeah, I think so. From the idea's archive, a documentary called Unfolding Visions.

It was the first of a two-part series on maps that originally aired in 2005. It was made in Vancouver by Kathleen Flaherty. Coming up on Monday on Ideas, my conversation with an historian whose 2017 book, On Tyranny, has suddenly become a Trump-era bestseller. Timothy Snyder is a specialist on Eastern Europe, as well as a go-to observer of his Native America.

Earlier this month, we discussed his new book, On Freedom, in front of an audience at the Toronto Reference Library. At one point, I asked the American historian why a country that used the slogan, better dead than red, during the Cold War era, now has an administration that admires Russia and undermines Ukraine.

Russia is no longer a communist state. I mean, Russia is a fascist state. So if you're a fascist, it's gonna be your thing. Within their own framework, they are correct to like Russia, and Russia is correct to like them, and the feeling is mutual. So I understand the question, but I think the historical irony is not really there because

Russia really is. It's the fascism of the third decade of the 20th century, so naturally our fascists like Russia. There are other things going on like that, with the Trump people, it's the notion, which is Russian, like this is the success of Russian imperial propaganda, that Russia is real and Ukraine is not really real. And they have this kind of fetish for what they think of

as strong men and strong countries, which has had the alarming consequence, and maybe we'll talk more about this, but it's had the alarming consequence of taking Russia and making it much stronger than it would have been otherwise. I mean, all of American foreign policy is now oriented towards making our enemies strong and our friends weak. Historian and author, Timothy Snyder. You can hear the rest of our conversation on Monday's episode of Ideas. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas.

The episode producer is Lisa Godfrey. Danielle Duval is our technical producer. Senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.