On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does

by Garfield, Simon

  s

  Where else would an eager person go for their cartographic education if not an increasingly fortified library? How about a series of tutorials run by W. Graham Arader III and his colleagues? Shortly before I visited him, Arader had begun placing advertisements for a summer course for high school and college students on which they could learn aspects of dealing. The course cost $1,200 a week and included what Arader had classified as the four key steps to making a sale: ‘A: Introduction. B: The Artwork exists. C: The Artwork can be owned. D: The Sale of the Artwork.’ Successful applicants would also receive lessons on maintaining relationships with clients and how to best use the Internet for trade. ‘Lots of my clients pressure me into hiring their entitled children,’ Arader told me. ‘So now they’ll have to pay for it. A kid comes in [to work with me], doesn’t do anything the entire summer, gets about $5,000-worth of education – that’s over!’

  When I asked Arader for some of the key nuggets that he’d be offering his students, he directed me to his blog. Here he spoke of simple advice: compose handwritten thank-you letters; don’t bombard your clients with emails but offer wise, measured and timely advice about items they might be particularly interested in.

  There was also advice about spotting fraudulent maps that were masquerading with ‘original colour’. In June 2011 Arader had taken a group of four interns (the last of the unpaying lot) up the road from his house to a viewing of an upcoming auction at Sotheby’s. They settled on Lot 88, a classic seventeenth-century study of Africa with many maps by the Dutch geographer Olfert Dapper.

  ‘It had the most amazing example of fake original colour imaginable,’ Arader noted. ‘We were all completely fooled – the greens oxidized through the paper almost perfectly. My first reaction was great excitement and lust for what looked like a magnificent book. But it was not.’

  Arader’s excitement soon turned to fury. He saw how cleverly the forger had tried to replicate the oxidisation of green that was usually the key indication of genuine contemporary colour. ‘The only way to protect yourself is to look at atlases with original colour in the great libraries of the world,’ he advised his interns, and vowed to expose the worst culprits. ‘Hopefully one of these creeps will be lured into suing me so that we can use the courts to finally come to an answer. I am on the warpath! Be warned.’

  Pocket Map

  Women Can’t Read Maps. Oh, Really?

  In 1998, the Australian couple Barbara and Allan Pease self-published a funny and gentle book called Why Men Don’t Listen & Women Can’t Read Maps: Beyond The Toilet Seat Being Up. Within a year, the book had lost the bit about the toilet seat but had become a global hit (12 million copies), and not long after that it had become one of those books that people talked about at bus stops and at work. It was a war-of-the-sexes study a bit like John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, except this one took things further, veering into bonkers-land. It explained why men can’t do more than one thing at a time, why women can’t parallel park, and ‘why men love erotic images and women aren’t impressed.’

  With reference to maps, their findings are unequivocal. ‘Women don’t have good spatial skills because they evolved chasing little else besides men,’ they assert. ‘Visit a multi-storey car park at any shopping mall and watch female shoppers wandering gloomily around trying to find their cars.’ The Peases were really confirming a stereotype that had existed since Columbus laid out his sailing gear: men, nervous of asking a stranger the way, just get on better with directions that fold.

  But is any of it true?

  Several years before the Peases turned their success into a cottage industry, academics had begun publishing gender-related map studies of their own. Actually they’d been doing this for a century, but from the late-1970s they began appearing with an unusual urgency. In 1978 we had Sex Differences In Spatial Abilities: Possible Environmental, Genetic and Neurological Factors by J.L. Harris from the University of Kansas; in 1982 J. Maddux presented a paper at the Association of American Geographers entitled Geography: The Science Most Affected by Existing Sex-Dimorphic Cognitive Abilities.

  Their approaches and findings varied, but yes, most psychological studies seemed to feel that when it came to such things as spatial skills, navigation and maps, men did seem to have the upper hand. It was thought likely that this would explain why the number of men doing PhDs in geography in the 1990s outnumbered women 4 to 1. It may also explain why, in 1973, the Cartographic Journal published a report by a man called Peter Stringer that stated he had recruited only women in his research into different background colours on maps because he ‘expected that women would have greater difficulty than men’ in reading them.

  But what if there was a very simple explanation to all of this, beyond unfettered prejudice? What if men and women could each read maps perfectly well, but in different ways? What if the only reason women had trouble reading maps is because they were designed by men with men in mind? Could maps be designed differently to appeal to women’s strengths?

  In 1999, a project was carried out at University of California by academics in geography, psychology and anthropology. This involved an extensive review of the existing literature on spatial abilities and map-reading, well over a hundred papers by now, and also a new series of experiments involving 79 residents of Santa Barbara (43 women and 36 men, aged between 19 and 76).

  The strongest conclusions in the literature – that men were better than women at judging the relative speeds of two moving images on a computer screen, and also at successfully judging the mental rotation of 2-D and 3-D figures – were thought to be not overly practical in real world situations. So the new experiments involved a bit of walking about and map sketching, as well as responding to verbal directions and learning to read fantasy maps. One of these showed an imaginary theme park named Amusement Land. It measured 8.5” × 11” and featured such landmarks as Python Pit, Purple Elephant Sculpture and Ice Cream Stand; having been given some moments to study it before it was taken away, participants then had to sketch the map for themselves with as many landmarks as possible. They were asked to perform a similar task with another fictional map entitled Grand Forks, North Dakota, which was actually a rotated map of the city of Santa Barbara. They were also led on a walking tour around a part of the university campus, before being given a map of the area and asked to write in the route they had taken.

  Amusement Land, where cartography, sex-differences and ice cream meet, at last.

  The authors concluded that although men were better at some tasks (estimating distances and defining traditional directional compass points), women were better at others (noting landmarks, some verbal description tests). When it came to map-use, both imaginary and real, women ruined the Peases’ book title; they could read maps as well as men, only they read them slightly differently.

  And there was growing evidence that they knew it. In 1977, the Journal of Experimental Psychology published an experiment that found that 20 of 28 male participants but only 8 of 17 females regarded themselves as having a ‘good sense of direction’. But by 1999 this had shifted, at least in Santa Barbara, as residents of both sexes reported feelings of growing ability. Out of ten categories (including ‘It’s not important to me to know where I am’, ‘I don’t confuse right and left much’ and ‘I am very good at giving directions’) there was no statistically significant difference and high self-belief among both sexes. Men did appear to be more confident when in the category of ‘I am very good at judging distances’, but on the big issue of ‘I am very good at reading maps’ there was again no discernible difference.

  What, then, is the perceived problem? The problem is, although women have no difficulties with navigation, the way they are told to navigate may be at fault. In December 1997, in an early British edition of Condé Nast Traveller, a writer called Timothy Nation wrote a brief essay wondering why, when we wander the streets of London it is far easier to get around by looking out for well-known landmarks than
it is to rigidly follow a map or compass. This was because maps only follow the line of a street – they look down. But when we walk we tend to look up and around. The flat, two-dimensional, look-down approach is suited to cognitive strategies used by men, but it is one that generally puts women at a disadvantage.

  Timothy Nation, whose real name was Malcolm Gladwell, the writer not yet known for his books The Tipping Point and Blink, then examined a famous experiment conducted at Columbia University in New York City in 1990 involving mazes and rats. This found that, when searching for food, male rats navigated differently to their female counterparts. When the geometry of their testing area was altered – dividers were introduced to create extra walls – the performance of male rats slowed down, while there was little effect on females. But the opposite was observed when the landmarks in the testing room – a table or a chair – were moved. Now the females became confused. This was the big news: males responded best to broad spatial cues (large areas and flat lines), whereas females relied on landmarks and fixtures.

  Could this have been a freaky result? Possibly, but several other experiments in the last twenty years have produced similar findings. The most recent was in 2010, when the American Psychological Association reported an Anglo-Spanish experiment in which even more rats were placed in a triangular-shaped pool to find a hidden platform. Again a comparable result – female rats benefit from locational cues, whereas the males race by them.

  Similar experiments have continued with men and women, again with comparable results. Few psychologists would now argue against these navigational differences. What is less certain is how these changes have come about. But we may well be back on the African plains with the hunter-gatherers. In this theory – and it’s a plausible one – men and women’s brains both developed through their navigational skills, but in different ways. Men sought the broad sweep of tracking and pursuit over large areas, while women tended to be down with the roots and berries, foraging skills aided by memory, and memory aided by landmarks.

  The traditional map, however, a 2-D flat plane, is designed by hunters for hunters. Female gatherers don’t get much of a look in. But with 3-D maps – either panoramic views with highlighted landmarks on paper, or digital renderings on screen – the road ahead becomes instantly more readable.

  One further experiment, conducted in 1998 by social psychologist James Dabbs and colleagues at Georgia State University, found that the strategy differences of the sexes extend to verbal communication. Dabbs found that when men give directions they tend to use compass points such as north or south, whereas women focus on buildings and lists of other landmarks en route.

  So perhaps Barbara and Allan Pease were right after all, or at least half-right. Men don’t listen because they don’t need to listen so much. And women can’t read maps because they’re the wrong sort of maps. What can possibly save this troublesome marriage? A plastic dashboard-mounted box perhaps?

  Maps for Women? Nancy Chandler, based in Bangkok, has been producing highly successful ‘3-D’ maps of Thailand for the past two decades. They look crowded and a little chaotic but feature hand-drawn landmarks and useful text, as well as colour-coding for different attractions. And, yes, she notes that her maps are bought and used predominantly by women.

  Chapter 20

  Driving Into Lakes: How Sat Nav Put the World in a Box

  It is the early 1980s, and you are travelling in an aeroplane at the beginning of your holiday. After take-off and drinks there is to be a movie. Mr Bean has not yet been made, and in-flight entertainment is still in its infancy, so the choice will be limited to one family film involving animals, shown on a row of small screens suspended from the ceiling. When the film is over there is another film, but it’s one you’ve seen before: a stubby plane flying across the sky from your place of departure to your place of arrival. You glance at it half an hour later and it’s still aloft. It’s the most boring piece of information it is possible to watch.

  The poet Simon Armitage has written of watching this film on a budget twelve-hour flight to Japan. The plane on the screen crawls over sea and land at a terrible pace, like a slow-motion shot on a putting green. Armitage watches with increasing desperation; after about three hours, a man behind him shouts ‘GET IN THE HOLE!’

  They’re showing that movie again …

  The plane on the screen – not a film at all, of course, but a real-time miniaturisation of our point above the earth – is peculiarly compelling despite its deathly monotony. The screen also displays stats on ground speed and outside air temperature, but it is the plane on the map we can’t stop watching, slightly jerky as it heads towards Stavanger and other places rarely in our thoughts, a map that serves to extend the tedium of flight rather than heightening its wonder. For many of us, travelling in the days before satellite navigation and phone apps, this was the first experience of watching a moving map.

  The maps were first made available to passengers by an American company called Airshow Inc, but the fundamental technology that drives them – a system involving a calibration of gyroscope and accelerometer – originates from the aeroplane’s cockpit. Known as inertial navigation, it is the map that has taken us on holiday for more than half a century.

  Inertial navigation has its roots in military research, specifically in missile guidance. Before the Second World War, missiles used to be fired in much the same way as Horatio Nelson fired cannon balls – destructive velocity outgunning geographical felicity. But then the Germans and Americans devised a way of steering weapons by rudder and tailfin (the Germans used it on their V2s, a switch from blanket bombing to slightly more accurate targeting), and the technique advanced to such a degree that it became a way of describing things that were complicated: rocket science. But its basic science is something we can all understand. A fixed point is logged at take-off, and computers then maintain a route by adapting to airborne motion sensors. At its core, the system is not too far removed from the method of ‘dead reckoning’ employed by Columbus and Magellan to navigate the oceans.

  That said, moving seat-back maps have come on a bit since the 1980s, and today offer 3-D graphics and instant satellite updates. The experience is now almost as good as looking out of the window. Inertial navigation is still used to guide our planes, although in the last decade it has been joined by another more accurate technology. It is the same piece of kit that has encouraged sea captains and car drivers to abandon their more traditional methods of navigation – lighthouses, paper maps, intuition – in favour of the indomitable, indisputable and surely failsafe method of advanced trilateration known as the Global Positioning System.

  t t t

  Over the years we have refined GPS to a point where almost anything going anywhere can be guided without a human being fouling things up. When the cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground on a Tuscan shore in January 2012, killing thirty-two people, it wasn’t GPS that was blamed; it was the captain for ignoring it. When the space shuttle Discovery took off for the International Space Station in 2006, GPS not only tracked its orbit, but also (for the first time) guided it home to Cape Canaveral. When people with a phone get lost anywhere in the world without a map, they are located and rescued thanks to GPS. And when you allow the ‘enable location?’ option on your phone app, it will be GPS that guides you to your nearest cashpoint.

  What a wonder. What a potential disaster.

  GPS is now such a significant part of our lives that the effects of failure would be catastrophic. Malfunction would be a blow not just to the digital cartographer and the iPhone user, it would be as if the world’s entire harvest of electricity, oil and gas had run out at the same time. The loss of GPS would now affect all emergency services, all systems of traffic control including shipping and flight navigation, and all communications bar semaphore. It would affect the ability to keep accurate time and predict earthquakes. It would set the guidance and interception of ballistic missiles to haywire. What would begin with gridlock at road intersection
s would very rapidly turn the world dark, and then off. Everything would stop. We would be practically blind. We would not be able to stock our shops and feed ourselves. Only those who knew how to plough a field like they did in the middle ages would have a chance.

  In the happy meantime, we have the pleasure of the TomTom Go Live 1005 World, a dashboard-mountable satellite navigation device that costs about £300 and contains detailed road maps of 66 countries. It is an astronomical, geographical and technological achievement of the greatest magnitude, and, given that it comes in a plastic and glass box with a five-inch HD touch-screen and live traffic reports, and, for an extra few pounds, the voice of Homer Simpson exclaiming ‘You have reached your destination, and you can hold your head up high because you are a genius!’, it is something that would have steered Ptolemy to the asylum.*

  One buys a TomTom device (or a Garmin, Strabo, Mio, or GoogleMap-enabled phone) not for the maps but for the directions, which makes it a rather old-fashioned concept. Lost without a map in the pre-digital world, one would ask for turn-by-turn instructions from locals – left at the church and then left again at the town hall – and a sat nav performs precisely the same function on a grander scale. Sat nav is not attractive because it is a road map of course – Appleton, Michelin, the AA and Rand McNally could have sold you one of those a century ago. It is attractive because it is a language, a code, and for people who could never read a map before, a liberation.

  Before we consider how it works, we should perhaps consider what happens when it doesn’t. In 2010, a driver in Bavaria followed his sat nav when it told him to do a U-turn on a motorway, and crashed into a 1953 Rolls Royce Silver Dawn. The Rolls was was one of only 760 made, which may explain why its owner promptly had a heart attack. He recovered; his Rolls did not. A few months later there was the case of Robert Ziegler, a Swiss van driver who followed his sat nav up a narrow mountain goat track and, being unable to turn around or reverse, had to be rescued by helicopter. Then there was the sad tale of a mini-cab driver in Norfolk who followed his sat nav into a river. His boss gleefully told the newspapers ‘He was in the car with his trousers rolled up. Fish were swimming around the headlights!’