[Basic] Skill of the week: Cartography

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

The issue isn't about Non-Iconographic at all (in my case, anyway). Rather, I'm trying to understand what sort of special skills of map-reading is included in Cartography. The fact that a map is part of standard equipment for Navigation, and that Cartography defaults to Navigation, is of additional relevance.

That's because of Skill Over Lap

While either Navigation or Cartography will let you read maps you don't need both.

they're separate skills because their focus is differ, Navigation is about setting and following a course, where Cartography let's you make accurate and detailed maps

Special skills involved in reading a Map include Determining and using scale, Understanding what contours depict. understanding what the colour shades mean. Telling what special notations mean, like know before you get their that a street is one way so you can plan on which direction to approach it from.

[Hai-Etlik]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

'Why Skill_A is not as simple as the public thinks' are great. Thanks for pointing out the problems of drawing maps.

Do you have any useful insights into the bit about Cartography being about reading maps?

It would probably help to know that there are three broad categories (with outliers, hybrids, and fuzzy edges of course)

Reference Maps are general purpose maps like you find in an atlas or on a wall in a classroom. They give a broad overview of generally important things like countries, rivers, and major cities. This is what most people think of when they think of maps. You can generally get what you were meant to get out of them without any special skill.

Charts are maps for navigation. Aviation sectionals, Nautical charts, and topographical maps all fall in this category. Surveying and engineering maps have a lot of similarities to navigational maps too. You might be able to use them as reference maps (particularly topographic maps) but otherwise they require the appropriate skill to read. Cartography would probably help in using them without the appropriate skill but is not a substitute. If a map is covered in arcane looking markings like compass roses, multiple graticules, rhumb lines, etc, then it's probably one of these.

Thematic maps are maps that present a specific set of information. Weather maps, population density maps, ecology maps, geology maps, etc. (Geology maps might be better off in a category all their own though) Depending on the map, you might be able to get some information out of it without the correct skill, but to really understand it, you probably need the appropriate domain skill. Again, Cartography might help in extracting a bit more information if you lack the correct skill but isn't really a substitute. If the map is covered with irregular squiggles, patches, or dots, then it's probably a thematic map.

Cartography could also be an aid in overcoming cultural differences. If you are a human geologist, then a general familiarity in cartography might help you to interpret a dwarven geology map which could present information in a radically different way. It could also assist in overcoming TL differences or bad cartography on the part of whoever created the map, or at least in detecting bad cartography.

Also, in modern times at least, true cartographers are a rarity. Most maps are made by GIS Technicians/Analysts. This covers the technical aspects of cartography along with analysis and data management that's not generally part of cartography, but but only covers enough of the design aspects of cartography to get by.

The GURPS skill Cartography/TL8 probably covers all of this range from spatial data management to map design with basic equipment for it being a workstation with a desktop GIS package and maybe a graphics editor to supplement it. If you want to get an idea of what that looks like, grab a copy of QuantumGIS, an Open Source example of a desktop GIS. (The company I work for includes QGIS in a suite of Open Source GIS software we sell support for so I'm not exactly unbiased in my recommendation.)

Also, what's ultra-hard about labelling in particular?

Labels cover things up. Features, other labels, etc. Positioning them so that they don't cover anything important, and are readable, and its clear what they are attached to requires taking everything around the feature being labelled into consideration, including other labels which in turn might depend on the label you are positioning. You also need to consider ways of showing additional information you might convey with a label using typeface, size, etc.

One of the particular pieces of software I work on is a tile cache for web maps. It breaks the map into tiles and asks the map server to render each tile, and then caches the tile to disk. There's no way to span labels across those tiles while using any sort of collision avoidance (moving or hiding labels) without considering every label on the entire map because there might be a label just outside the area you are rendering which collides with one inside, which leads to a chain of collisions which impacts a label inside the visible tile.

That doesn't even consider the difficulties of positioning labels on lines or areas where deciding on the correct spacing an positioning are very much a matter of how humans perceive things. I've never seen an automated way of doing the gracefully curved area labels common in human cartography.

It's often said that good label placement should take as long as everything else put together. There are entire books on just how to do labels and in my mind, labelling is the clearest sign distinguishing a true cartographer from a GIS analyst or graphic designer who is making a map.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by johndallman

GURPS' "Non-Iconographic" disadvantage is pretty severe. I suspect it's meant for alien species who just don't think that way, or humans with severe problems.

My teenage years school was keen on outdoor activities, and I remember some of my fellow-pupils couldn't make sense of maps at first, but I suspect that in GURPS terms they were just missing the experience to get a default in Navigation (Land). My parents were both used to reading maps, and I think I picked it up from them when quite young.

Terry Pratches makes a point out of one of the characters in his "Discworld" series of novels not being able to understand maps. Granny Weatherwax, I think it was.

The freeware RPG system Quest FRP v2.1 also makes the point that at certain DoMs for skills, the character gains the ability to read maps, thereby implying that historically, not everybody could.

[Flyndaran]

I think part of the issue might be that maps are models, and the old saying that every model is wrong, but some are useful fits.
Laymen can rarely guess at what features are intentionally inaccurate to make the accurate information easier to read and gauge. Look at all the people that think Greenland is huge just because of the common Mercator projection.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I think part of the issue might be that maps are models, and the old saying that every model is wrong, but some are useful fits.
Laymen can rarely guess at what features are intentionally inaccurate to make the accurate information easier to read and gauge. Look at all the people that think Greenland is huge just because of the common Mercator projection.

Greenland is huge - it's the largest island on Terra.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Greenland is huge - it's the largest island on Terra.

It is, but it's less than a third the area of Australia, whereas on a Mercator map of the world, it looks as if it's rather larger.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I think part of the issue might be that maps are models, and the old saying that every model is wrong, but some are useful fits.
Laymen can rarely guess at what features are intentionally inaccurate to make the accurate information easier to read and gauge. Look at all the people that think Greenland is huge just because of the common Mercator projection.

Also consider how much the width of roads needs to be exaggerated to make them usefully wide on a map.

[Hai-Etlik]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

Also consider how much the width of roads needs to be exaggerated to make them usefully wide on a map.

That's not so much exaggeration of width as a representation of the abstract ideal of the road as a linear feature using a visual line symbol that has a width. The width of the symbol and any width the linear feature may have are not meant to have a direct relationship with one another. On especially large scale maps the symbol representing the centre line of the road can be narrower than the scale representation of the road as an area.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

Also consider how much the width of roads needs to be exaggerated to make them usefully wide on a map.

I would hope that even cartographically ignorant people would understand that. Unlike how projection distortions are often misunderstood.

[Kromm]

In my campaigns, Cartography is often a complementary skill to Tactics when planning an assault, to Intelligence Analysis when preparing an intelligence briefing, and so on. It's also useful in its own right for creating maps to sell, and when searching through large numbers of maps (it is to maps as Speed-Reading is to text, and can completely replace Research when examining maps). These applications are largely pass/fail, and high skill is mostly useful for absorbing penalties for using insufficient hands, makeshift mapping tools, and haste.

I also allow rolls against the mapmaker's skill in lieu of a third party's Area Knowledge or Navigation skill where those following a map have never been in a mapped area which can't usefully be navigated using sun, stars, shadows, compass, etc. For instance, if a spy scouts a tunnel network and creates a map, his pals who go in with that map later on roll vs. his Cartography skill to find their way around. This roll can sometimes serve as a "resistance" roll to mundane or supernatural trickery aimed to confuse invaders using illusions and moving walls.

Most of the time, the character who takes this skill does so in lieu of all the others mentioned above – she's not a high-IQ analyst and planner with Intelligence Analysis, Navigation, Research, Speed-Reading, Tactics, etc., but rather a high-DX scout with Acrobatics, Climbing, Jumping, Stealth, and so on who focuses on one specific IQ-based skill that aids her allies' efforts.