MapBrief™

Mom was right: we live in a judgmental world where first impressions linger.

On the web, it’s worse: the majority of us are impulsive information grazers on a restless daily quest to gather the factoids, bite-sized insights, and small amusements that feed a post-modern soul.

So when building an online web map to capture these 40 seconds of distracted attention, the challenge is to manage the initial perception of your content with the assumption that no one reads the small print before diving in. And as we’ve mentioned many times before, the user response to confusion is not “maybe I should read the Help”; they simply leave.

What I discuss below aren’t “bad” maps per se (a couple of them are very well executed), but rather come with perception-management challenges that, while addressed through text, nonetheless open a gulf between what they are trying to communicate and what the distracted, hurried user (admittedly, me) is absorbing in the first few seconds of inspection.

One Dot/One Vote In Los Angeles Mayoral Race

I loved this map that was published by the LA Times the day after the mayoral election. But then I winced when I saw “One dot = one vote”.  Because having a background in Elections I was darn glad I wasn’t manning the phones the next day…

Irate Citizen: “Why does the LA Times have a map of where every voter lives and who they voted for? That’s an unlawful violation of privacy!”

Before explaining the very defensible methodology of placing a dot randomly within the voter’s precinct boundary, Irate Citizen has slammed the phone down and is now composing invective for his City Council-person.

The larger point is that people impute a very high degree of precision/accuracy to anything that is placed on an official-looking map. So if one dot equals one voter, then that voter must be exactly where he/she is placed on the map.  Never mind it’s written twice that dots were randomly placed. I would’ve gone for One Dot = 5 Voters just to break that instant mental link between a single voter, their location, and their secret ballot that is the cornerstone of democracy.

Oklahoma Tornado Damage Estimates

Over the last few years I have been impressed by the work of SpatialKey and would rank Doug McCune (@dougmccune )  in my Top-5-Funniest-Presenters-I’ve-Seen-At-A-Tech-Conference. But disaster mapping is tricky because things are moving fast and emotions are raw.

It clearly announces itself as a Population Density map with tornado tracks overlaid.  In the immediate aftermath such information is handy in trying to wrap one’s head around a basic sense of scale.  But as soon as the skies clear we have expectations of actual damage assessments.  Further, the use of a red palette is not emotionally neutral, especially in the context of a disaster.  So with your varying shades of red you’re asking too much of the viewer NOT to infer that the most intense reds indicate the greatest damage (rather than the highest concentration of residents).  Add the mercurial nature of tornado damage–one neighbor’s house is leveled, another’s is untouched–and one wonders whether the choropleth approach should have been left on the sideline until actual damage could be tallied and mapped.

Yes, That Is A Lot of Data

This Guardian map was depicts 11,000 CIA rendition flights.  Which is a lot. But with an initial view that displays all of those routes, the first impression is one of visual confusion.  A handy rule of thumb is to give your viewer an insightful look of the data on the initial load so even if they don’t interact with the map but merely gaze at it for 5-7 seconds they’ll have a useful takeaway.  I’m not sure this map meets that threshold.

When Photoshop Attacks

A symptom of advanced cartophilia is looking for meaning in a map where there is none. This gem was passed around among a few of us on Twitter–

You’re immediately tempted to grab your cube-mate: “bro, check out this pattern of crazy intense poverty in southern Hunterdon County.”  Then you remember that Hunterdon County, NJ is one of the top ten wealthiest counties in the US.

You’ve just been punk’d by a headphone-wearing, Photoshop-wielding Millennial who is so much better than his crap graphic design job.  And is probably too young to recall this Onion classic.

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There is an unfortunate asymmetry between the time it takes to craft an effective online map and the time viewers actually spend with it.  Often we’re presenting large amounts of not-easily-digestible data to someone not completely paying attention, may not be wholly fluent in the emerging grammars of visual information, and with a hair-trigger mouse finger eternally poised to click through to the next thing. Bridging the gap between the reality of your map and the perception of your map can often seem thankless.

Welcome to the web.

—Brian Timoney

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

– Truman Capote

Like many readers of this blog, I was heartened by last week’s Executive Order from the President of the United States declaring “Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information.”  Finally, tangible progress on the rocky road leading to Transparency, Accountability, and Economic Benefit.

But as I finished said Executive Order, my heart sank. For it didn’t include an explicit disqualification of the PDF format as meeting the “machine readable” threshold.

No criminal classifications either.

Nor mandatory jail sentences.

In a word: Weak.

‘The Heart of Nerd Darkness’

If you’ve never suffered personally the travails of extracting usable data from a PDF, I strongly recommend Jeremy Merrill’s wrenching first-person account of compiling usable, ready-for-analysis data from some 2 million records trapped inside PDFs.  Similarly painful experiences led to Caitlin Rivers’ post ” ‘Send Me Your Data–PDF is Fine’, Said No One Ever…” which includes helpful guidelines for would-be data publishers.

How bad is the problem? People have admitted online to reading PDFs data aloud and having a colleague key the data into a spreadsheet.

This is not the world Gutenberg intended.

Sins of Omission, Sins of Commission

With PDFs fulfilling the deep human need to impose one’s print layout on others, we’re tempted to forgive their progenitors for they know not what they do.

And then there’s Orange County, California.

In a long-running case against the Sierra Club over the county’s right to charge $475,000 for its parcel database, the county defended the access granted to citizens by observing that information about each of the county’s 640,000 parcels was available as a freely downloadable PDF.

Lovely.

Who among the GIS crowd has not re-digitized features from a PDF while internally raging with the knowledge that the source data already exists in digital form?

Exactly.  What makes the PDF so infuriating is what makes it so beloved among the passive-aggressive set dedicated to being only semi-helpful.

The Scanned Image of Data Inside a PDF

The horror.

The horror.

—Brian Timoney

 
 
UPDATE: Steve Romalewski blogged his experience with NYC open data as PDF in 2011.

The party is over.

During the 1990s anything related to IT was expensive and fat profit margins were easily procured. Post-9/11 was very good for geospatial contracting with both the escalation of defense spending to support three wars as well as the mushrooming requirements of the Department of Homeland Security. But now sequestration–and its impacts on the DoD in particular–are the unmistakable sign that a golden era of contracting has drawn to a close.

But over the last decade another geospatial industry sprung up–the one we’re all familiar with: Internet-based, massive high-performance platforms taking full advantage of the plunging costs of computing to elevate mapping to its current status as a core component of the everyday web experience.

After a couple of decades of easy living, what would you do when confronted with the prospect of competing against lower-margin, faster-paced innovation?

You wouldn’t settle for half-measures, that’s for sure.  No, you too would get your lobbying group MAPPS busy helping draft something like H.R. 1604 “Map It Once, Use It Many Times”: a private sector takeover of Federal mapping activities in the United States.

US Federal Geospatial Has Always Been A Mess

No one is disputing that the problem isn’t large.  The government’s watchdog arm–the GAO–has consistently identified the same problem, over and over:

For decades, the federal government has tried to reduce duplicative geospatial data collection by coordinating GIS activities within and outside the federal government.

– June 2, 2003

But measures such as better implementation of FGDC standards and NSDI initiatives such as Geospatial One-Stop were going to fix all of that.  How did that work out?

We found that federal agencies had not effectively implemented policies and procedures that would help them to identify and coordinate geospatial data acquisitions across the government. As a result, the agencies make duplicative investments and risk missing opportunities to jointly acquire data.

– April, 2013

So MAPPS comes along with this “Map It Once, Use It Many Times.”  We should all be on our feet cheering, right? Because the narrative is so easy to buy into:

Lumbering, ineffective government bureaucracies wasting tax-payer money for decades in desperate need of the efficiency-creating skills of the private sector.

It’s a great story.

Except for one glaring, very inconvenient fact.

MAPPS Members Made Hundreds of Millions of Dollars From All of That Inefficiency, Redundancy, and Lack of Coordination

Somehow the fairy tale MAPPS is trying to sell omits the small detail that much of what their legislation claims to fix were essential features of a business model that was very, very lucrative for its members. Because where did the billions go, actually? Are there hordes of retired Park Service cartographers and USGS geodesists kicking back on their yachts in La Jolla that I don’t know about?

“Map It Once, Use It Many Times”?  After decades of the contractor game of “Capture it Once, And Sell It To As Many Different Agencies as Possible”?

So MAPPS members fancy themselves the solution to the problems that just so happened to have made them a lot of money over the years?

Got it.

Let’s dig into the details of the legislation to more fully appreciate the nobility of our White Knight Geospatial Saviors.

All Your Mapping Belongs to Us

Acronyms.  We need more acronyms.

The first order of business is to establish that National Geospatial Technology Administration (NGTA) within the US Geological Survey.  As part of the NGTA we are also establishing a National Geospatial Policy Commission (Sec 201).  The National Geospatial Policy Commission will be tasked with creating a National Geospatial Data Plan.  Of course, a National Geospatial Database will also be created (Sec 103) that will house the predictable stuff: cadastral, orthoimagery, elevation and bathymetry, etc., etc.  Additionally, other data “useful in carrying out national priorities”–healthcare, broadband, home mortgages, emergency response, and a bunch more–will be included.

What agencies’ geospatial functions will be completely taken over by the NGTA?

How about all of the geospatial functions that reside in the Department of Interior (BIA, BLM, NPS, USFWS, USGS), USDA (including Forest Service), and NOAA.

That’s a lot.

Now how might this National Geospatial Database be funded? Section 103 e(2) suggests “user fees” will be considered.  Since a vast quantity of geospatial data generated by the agencies listed above is provided free to the public, discussion of “user fees” is crazy talk, right?

Not in the MAPPS universe. These folks have openly described the attractiveness of user fees–taxes!–with respect to the use of geospatial data.

So a possible result of all of this efficiency and cost savings is that the public will end up paying for data that now is free…

 
The Gutting of the Federal Mapping Workforce

SECTION 303 CONVERSION TO CONTRACTOR PERFORMANCE.

(a) Conversion of Activities Identified by Commission- Each agency head shall convert, to the maximum extent possible, to performance by private geospatial firms, all activities identified by the National Geospatial Policy Commission for conversion under section 202(b)(2) that are performed by or for the agency.

We’ve seen this movie before.

In 1998 President Clinton signed the Federal Activities Inventory Reform (FAIR) Act that called for streamlining government by using the private sector to provide services more cheaply than government employees whenever possible.

Fifteen years in, what does the data say?

The net cost to the tax payer of a contractor is twice as much as a federal employee.

And we get to throw out institutional memory and trample what’s left of the rich mapping traditions of the USGS, NPS, etc. in the bargain.

An Industry in Desperate Need of Government Encouragement

SEC. 402 STRATEGY FOR ENCOURAGING FEDERAL USE OF PRIVATE GEOSPATIAL FIRMS.

(a) Development of Strategy- Not later than one year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Administrator shall cooperate with private geospatial firms, and any associations composed exclusively of such firms, to develop a comprehensive strategy to encourage and enhance the use of private geospatial firms by Federal agencies and other entities that receive Federal funds, including State and local governmental agencies, universities, nonprofit organizations, and foreign governments.

It’s not enough that the private sector take over Federal mapping activities in toto–now anyone who receives government dollars will be “encouraged” to use private geospatial contractors. Because heaven forbid a university that receives Federal funds use its own cartography lab to create the campus map when there is a private firm at the ready.

Unbelievable.

But all in the name of free enterprise, of course.

      Hey, look: Private Sector investment in Spatial Data Infrastructure

 
Yet the Free Market is Massively Investing in Spatial Data Infrastructure

You would never know from reading MAPPS press releases that right now, in 2013, in the United States of America, some notable companies are making sizable investments in spatial data: Google, Microsoft, Apple, and even Amazon.

National Spatial Data Infrastructure?  That would be Google to the average citizen.

Isn’t this the joy of capitalism writ large?  Private companies risking private capital to invest millions in mapping and create a massive consumer surplus that gives joy every time you turn on your smartphone?

What MAPPS intentionally confuses is their pro-business stance with the principles of free markets.  Because as Luis Zingales so memorably puts it, “true capitalism lacks a strong lobby“.

If You’re Part of the Problem, Perhaps You Should Have a Lesser Role in the Solution

No one disputes that government IT and its procurement systems are broken.  But the solutions put forth by H.R. 1604 simply aren’t credible given the two decades-long track record of heavy contractor involvement in federal geospatial activities.  Recent innovative projects the FCC and National Park Service offer glimpses of the alternative paths available when agencies don’t reflexively cede control of their projects to outside vendors. Because frankly, the technology is the easy part: it’s the anthropology–the organizational culture–that’s difficult. For far too long the upper management at these agencies has rubber-stamped increasingly cumbersome technology from private contractors seemingly optimized to create and perpetuate prolonged organizational dependency.

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Admittedly, whinging at the mendacity of a lobbying group does have a rather pronounced tilting-at-windmills feel to it.  If MAPPS is vigorously representing the interests of their members, so be it, right?  But what this proposed legislation makes abundantly clear is that these members–Sanborn, ESRI, Hexagon, et al–have such a dispiriting, narrow vision of their future: utterly backwards looking; taxpayer-be-damned, Federal-employee-be-damned.

What remains unclear is if this baldly retrograde expression of self-interest will be countered with anything other than servile, silent assent by the industry at large.

 
 
 
—Brian Timoney