In working on my final project, I picked up a copy of “How to Lie With Maps” by Mark Monmonier at the library. I haven’t gotten too far into the book, but its concept, of the way that maps are always more complex than they look on the outside, provides a useful starting point for the discussion of scale. The article by Atkinson and Tate on scale provides an overview of some of the problems that scale brings up in our work, and proposes some ways that we may work with or around this problem. The question I would like to pose, (as it seems that on the technical/data collection side no large changes will help us solve the issue of variable scale any time soon), is how we may be accountable in our GIS work, specifically at a representational level, to problems of scaling.
To someone untrained in GIS, or unaccustomed to critical reading, a map is just a map, an abstraction of reality. For this type of viewer (and not only of maps, but I use this example because it is the most simple), how can we be transparent about what the image lacks or what data the image obscures? It is easy to lie with maps and it is easy to choose an aggregation that is advantageous to those invested in the project, but it is not so easy to make this clear to the uninformed viewer. So I ask, as I always do: Is being accountable to issues of scale in GIS possible? Is it desirable (and if so, when) ?
Wyatt
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