"Cartography is about representation. This statement may seem obvious, but it has been overlooked in our search for organizing principles for the field. Rather than restricting research in cartography to maps that present well-defined messages (and suggesting a single, map-engineering approach to improving the transmission of these messages, as the communication approach did), attention to maps as spatial representation expands the field." (Alan M MacEachren, "How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design", 1995)
"Exploring maps as representation forges important links between cartography and a variety of cognate fields concerned with this topic in its various facets (including geographical information systems [GIs] and remote sensing, as well as art, cognitive science, sociology, cognitive and environmental psychology, semiotics, and even the history and philosophy of science)." (Alan M MacEachren, "How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design", 1995)
"It may be that the human brain not only perceives but stores the essentials of a visual scene using the same geometrical, quasi-symbolic, minimalist vocabulary found in maps." (Alan M MacEachren, "How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design", 1995)
"Maps, due to their melding of scientific and artistic approaches, always involve complex interaction between the denotative and the connotative meanings of signs they contain." (Alan M MacEachren, "How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design", 1995)
"The fact that map is a fuzzy and radial, rather than a precisely defined, category is important because what a viewer interprets a display to be will influence her expectations about the display and how she interacts with it." (Alan M MacEachren, "How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design", 1995)
"The representational nature of maps, however, is often ignored - what we see when looking at a map is not the word, but an abstract representation that we find convenient to use in place of the world. When we build these abstract representations we are not revealing knowledge as much as are creating it." (Alan M MacEachren, "How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design", 1995)
"To make maps that work, we must depict categories using methods that match the structures of human mental categorization." (Alan M MacEachren, "How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design", 1995)
"Understanding how maps work and why maps work (or do not work) as representations in their own right and as prompts to further representations, and what it means for a map to work, are critical issues as we embark on a visual information age." (Alan M MacEachren, "How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design", 1995)
"When visualization tools act as a catalyst to early visual thinking about a relatively unexplored problem, neither the semantics nor the pragmatics of map signs is a dominant factor. On the other hand, syntactics (or how the sign-vehicles, through variation in the visual variables used to construct them, relate logically to one another) are of critical importance." (Alan M MacEachren, "How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design", 1995)
"Cartography as a discipline has a significant stake in the evolving role of maps within systems for scientific visualization, within spatial decision support systems, within hypermedia information access systems, and within virtual reality environments." (Alan M MacEachren, "Exploratory cartographic visualization: advancing the agenda", 1997)
"The nature of maps and of their use in science and society is in the midst of remarkable change - change that is stimulated by a combination of new scientific and societal needs for geo-referenced information and rapidly evolving technologies that can provide that information in innovative ways. A key issue at the heart of this change is the concept of ‘visualization’." (Alan M MacEachren, "Exploratory cartographic visualization: advancing the agenda", 1997)
"Maps have been a successful form of representation for centuries by making the world understandable through systematic abstraction that retains the iconicity of space depicting space. Advances in methods and technologies are blurring the lines among maps and other forms of visual representation and pushing the bounds of 'map' as a concept toward both more realistic and more abstract depiction. As a result, there are a variety of unanswered questions about the attributes and implications of 'maps'." (Alan M MacEachren, "Research Challenges in Geovisualization", 2001)
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