Thematic Mapping: 101 Inspiring Ways to Visualise Empirical Data
By Kenneth Field
In his second book on cartography, Thematic Mapping: 101 Inspiring Ways to Visualise Empirical Data, Kenneth Field explores the “many decisions, opportunities, constraints” that are involved in both making and reading maps. He uses the same dataset to create 101 thematic maps of various types that illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of each.
“This entire book is based on the fundamental idea that there are few maps that can be thought of as right or wrong,” Field wrote in Thematic Mapping. “They all tell different truths and different shades of the truth and what represents one person’s truth well may not chime with another person’s truth.”
Each map in this book uniquely portrays a single dataset using area, point, line, and 3D maps; cartograms; graphs; charts; and plots. The perception of the data has been influenced by the choice of colors, symbols, and other cartographic details. These maps illustrate the beauty and bane of cartography: There isn’t one objective and immutable way to make a map. This is the overarching message of the book.
Field, whose cartographic practice includes both academic and commercial work, has won many awards for his maps and his writing. Thematic Mapping won a prestigious International Cartographic Association (ICA) award in 2021 for best education product. His previous book, Cartography., also won first-place honors for best education product from the ICA in 2019. Esri Press, 2022, pp. 296, print ISBN: 9781589485570, ebook ISBN: 9781589485587.
Valuing Place and Purpose: GIS for Land Administration
By Brent Jones and Keith Mann
The availability of standardized, high-quality land data is vital to a successful economy. Land records and land management were some of the first applications of GIS. More recently, land data has become part of strategies that mitigate climate change and work toward social equity. Valuing Place and Purpose: GIS for Land Administration addresses all these applications of GIS to improve the creation, maintenance, and use of land data in a collection of real-world case studies. They describe the benefits of integrating GIS to modernize processes and information dissemination. They can serve as a guide for applying locational intelligence to common problems and societal challenges. (It is slated for publication in the third quarter of 2022.) Esri Press, 2022, pp. 120, print ISBN: 9781589487062, ebook ISBN: 9781589487079.
