| Large numbers of maps are produced daily for magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and other popular media. These "popular maps" are for an audience which is not formally trained in map use. These maps are products of a coherent, reasonable, and appropriate system of graphic communication, one which need not be explicitly conscious to either the readers or the makers of the maps. This system is called a cartography--in direct analogy to a language, the coherent, reasonable, and appropriate system of verbal communication.;The cartography of popular maps is related to, but distinct from, the formal "academic cartography" with which geographers are familiar. The study of popular maps gives a new perspective on the general nature of maps, as well as a display of the flexible and highly efficient mapping skills of the popular audience.;A map is like a sentence, in both form and function. In form, a map and a sentence can each be shown to consist of a central "actor" (a subject in a sentence, or a key place on a map), an "action" (a verb phrase, or the mapped relationship to another place), and some rules of assembly (a syntax, or a graphic composition). In function, each map or sentence exists in a specific rhetorical context (each can chide, amuse, or expound, for example), and in a specific historical or ethnographic context (e.g., in the symbol system of Americans, or in that of the Mayans). |
